It didn't look like this. Especially not in 1993. They are mixing a bunch of metaphors from different time periods. Mostly late 90s but nothing ever animated like this either.
There were add-ons that added animated tricks to the window manager even back in the Win3.1 days. Nothing like you get with more modern GPU-based compositing techniques as everything had to be done in software and CPUs were not all that fast, but you could get animated icons, windows that slid or faded into view, and other such.
It was slow and jerky, even on what was high-end kit at the time, but that didn't stop people playing.
Running such software was a first class way to bring on a blue-screen, or in "standard mode" just hang everything, of course!
Active Desktop...
I had one of those were almost every single icon on the desktop was animated, even "My Computer".
Edit: multiple people mentioned windowblinds. I used it too in the late 90s. My point stands.
I definetly remember Windowsblinds too (and geez, it seems they're still around ...).
I was into LiteStep, which basically was a shell replacement for explorer.exe.
I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.
Here are some screenshots:
[0] https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-aug00g.jpg
Fun fact, Win98 still had progman.exe installed (from win 3.1 and earlier). I had to switch to it in system.ini one day when something in explorer got corrupted and the normal UI wouldn't load.
http://toastytech.com/guis/cpdesk.html
It was bloated and unstable though, so I was glad to upgrade to windows 95.
I also used eFX, which was a free Windowblinds competitor that made it super easy to make skins, and released a ton of garish and ugly ones back in the day.
Many free other apps existed that did similar things too.
In those days as I recall setting X to work at a good resolution was sometimes much more painful than it had to be. Since the 2000s (after the fork to Xorg for example) autoconfig got a lot better. I seem to recall it was possible to trigger a config that would give you a very low physical resolution but high res virtual desktop.
Animated icons have never existed aside from hacks like Active Desktop or active running programs in system tray / taskbar (again, using hacks where the icon was changed every second).
I remember I pinched the API guide for XP thinking "if it works in XP then it must work in Windows 2000" and the reason I remember that so vividly was because it didn't work properly. In fact it caused a kernel panic. Which was pretty much the only time I managed to upset Windows 2000 badly enough to cause a "blue screen of death".
If you were able to build it for Win2K, and it compiled successfully, then it was supported - it wouldn't be in the headers otherwise. Even if you build it with XP as a target, and then run on 2K, you'd get a regular Win32 error about not being able to resolve a symbol from a DLL. Getting a BSOD indicates a driver issue.
MSDN also says that it is supported for Win2K+: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/n...
Aero in Vista was something else - it was the first version of Windows that did whole desktop composition, and so it could do all kinds of fancy stuff, similar to Compiz that preceded it on Linux. Transparent windows in 2K/XP used per-window composition.
(I say "pretty sure" because I once wrong a program to create a second mouse cursor but which was controlled via a game controller. The logic being I could multi-task my GUI operations. Obviously the logic was flawed and that application proved dumb but it was a fun development exercise none-the-less. Anyhow, I think I drew the cursor directly to screen by reading and writing pixels using some Win32 API; but I'm not super confident of that memory).
I don't agree with your icon point though. I don't recall anyone calling those boolean icon states as "animated".
- Xrender wasn't released in the 90s,
- isn't window manager (ie a compositing window manager could use Xrender for compositing (like KWin supports when OpenGL isn't available) but Xrender itself isn't a WM)
- and isn't even available on Windows (which was the OS we were talking about)
I think perhaps you might have misunderstood me? (it wasn't my clearest written post).
And I know XRender is not a WM, FFS, my first distro was Debian Woody so I know my shit better than those Compiz bling-bling new users.
And not only KWIN did that, a lot of WM's did different FX in software by either using XRender or custom coding (such as Afterstep).
1. No. I was talking about Windows. Compiz was mentioned as a comparison to give an idea of time lines. You then decided to interpret my entire post to mean something quite different.
2. The comment about compositing was window managers, not X. Xrender, in this context, would be equivalent to OpenGL (albeit one uses hardware frame buffers et al and the other uses software).
3. Even in your Xrender point, the window animations in Linux would still have to be done via a compositing window manager such as Kwin -- which supports both Xrander and OpenGL libraries.
3 (i). ...or if not a compositing WM, an entirely separate display manager replacing X. Though even there, you'd likely still want to go down the compositing route because it's much easier.
> And I know XRender is not a WM, FFS, my first distro was Debian Woody so I know my shit better than those Compiz bling-bling new users.
1. Then why are you flipflopping between different stacks of libraries as if they're one and the same?
2. The length of time you've been using Linux isn't a useful yardstick for how much more you might know stuff
2 (i). Furthermore, HN is a technical crowd so I'm sure most on here have been using Linux at least that long. I've been running Slackware since the 90s and I know from previous conversations I'm far from a unique case. So I'd be careful about assuming your audience when commenting on here.
2 (ii). It's also worth noting that almost no new users would be using Compiz these days anyway. There's just no need when most of the popular desktop environments ship their own compositing WMs. Plus the novelty factor just isn't there now like it was back in 00s.
3. Also please tone down your language. There's no need to be rude.
> And not only KWIN did that, a lot of WM's did different FX in software by either using XRender or custom coding (such as Afterstep).
1. Nobody said compositing had to happen in hardware.
2. "FX" like menu transparencies (as you mentioned elsewhere) isn't even remotely the same as the window animations originally being discussed and being demonstrated in the Windows 93 demo linked to; and for a multitude of reasons:
2 (i) For starters you're overlaying within the same window. Things used to get trickier when you needed "FX" to interact with parts outside of your form (worse still, other applications too).
2 (ii) Transparency also wasn't computationally expensive to do in software compared to the kind of transformations that Compiz did -- and that the Windows 93 demo does. The Compiz/93 style animations simply wouldn't have been practical for general purpose computing without hardware graphics libraries (bare in mind the specifications of the average computer in the 90s and early 00s).
2 (iii) ...and I know this from experience because I used to write graphical shells for both Windows and Linux in the late 90s and early 00s.
Or just VESA and Windows' optimized 2D libraries. GDI is a good example. Most 2D FXs don't require a hard computation. Seriously, Enlightenment did those in software.
You underestimate what could've done in software in the 90's, especially when memory protection under w9x was nil and everything was much more low level.
Insecure? A lot. Would it work? Yes.
Windows 98 could do these with 3rd party software.
>Slackware in late 90's
Debian Woody was almost like late 90's for obvious reasons. It shipped a 2.2 kernel with 2.4 being the optional and bleeding edge one.
From what I remember of GDI (and admittedly it's been a while since I've done graphics development on Windows) GDI wasn't designed for real time animations. It was more designed for static (or at least semi-static) scenes like image editing. Real time transformations is a whole different ball game.
Either way, GDI certainly wasn't optimised. If you wanted optimised then you'd have used DirectDraw (which doesn't exist now but back then it was a thing).
> Most 2D FXs don't require a hard computation.
But we're not talking about "fx" as you keep calling it, we're talking about real time transformations interacting with multiple different canvases (to borrow a term from web development). Wobbly windows is a whole different ball game to transparent forms. Then you need to factor in that those transformations need to happen without slowing desktop performance.
Windows 9x used to do really basic "animations" which required no transformation effects and even that used to get turned off by a great many people on modest hardware because of the impact it had on performance.
You're just not being realistic about either the transformation effects in question (repeatedly moving the goal posts to basic translucency on stationary forms) nor the hardware of the era in question.
> Seriously, Enlightenment did those in software.
Enlightenment is a seriously cool piece of engineering but it didn't do compositing until E16. And it wasn't even the early versions of E16 either. So we're not talking late 90s / early 00s there either.
Also did Enlightenment really do that in software or are you just assuming it did?
> You underestimate what could've done in software in the 90's, especially when memory protection under w9x was nil and everything was much more low level.
Graphics development was not more low level. The opposite was actually the problem: Windows APIs lacked direct hardware access the early part of the 9x life time. In fact literally the entire point of GDI was to offer an approximation of what could be done with direct hardware access but without giving Windows developers low level APIs. The obvious side-effect of that is a massive performance hit. There was a reason DirectDraw was so sorely needed and a reason why a great many games developers still favoured DOS for the early part of 9x's life.
> Windows 98 could do these with 3rd party software.
But it didn't do real time transformation effects and that 3rd party software often ran like a sack of shit on peoples systems. Usually the people you saw who ran it well were gamers on high end systems.
> Debian Woody was almost like late 90's for obvious reasons.
No it wasn't. It was released in 2002[1]. The testing repo for woody wasn't even created until mid December 2000[2] (so basically 2001).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Debian_...
[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-detail...
> So the development of Windows "Chicago" was started and, as it was planned for a late 1993 release, became known as Windows 93 which was also known as Windows 4.0.
I thought they had some design ideas in a later cancelled OS called Cairo, then they had a release codenamed Chicago which ported some ideas but dramatically scaled back, and that was Win95.
Source: worked at msft from 92-97.
I know the history of NT based windows much better, I was at MS later, and in Windows.
EDIT: Yeah, you're right, there was some UI that made it to 95. From wikipedia:
"The Windows 95 user interface was based on the initial design work that was done on the Cairo user interface."
I was like 13 but thats what I remember...
* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...
http://www.windowswiki.info/wp-content/uploads/codenames/PX0...
http://www.windowswiki.info/wp-content/uploads/codenames/PX0...