A Windows 95-like shell for Windows 3.1x
calmira.net
calmira.net
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/241217/159136746-e...
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/241217/159136763-e...
Cok guzel, helal olsun :)
ve tesekkurler :)
- Another Turkish expat living in the same city as you do
I still mostly do, but the laptop I'm using right now has Windows 10 on it (for now), and I don't even mind.
Anyway, I wish I knew about your project back then. The Motif look is so much nicer. It doesn't have those garish strong colours all over the place. And the widgets are more familiar.
Modern desktops are still better than either option (you even basically say as much on Github) but your project was certainly solid, and an alternative that is so much easier on the eyes.
If I hadn't found CWM I'd probably still be on FVWM2 (with the mwm theme.) IDK if that counts as a "modern desktop" but I'm certainly a fan.
Windows 95 was a phenomenal success IMHO in terms of UI design, and it was partly based on Cairo which got a lot of inspiration from NextSTEP, but Win95 became so widespread that it became somewhat bland, so I agree in that sense. I strongly recommend the story about how Windows 95 team achieved excellence in the UI design, especially the "Start" button and Taskbar, the things that we take for granted today: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Version 1.2:
http://toastytech.com/guis/geos12.html
Version 2.0:
There was a time when the OS/2 1.x and Windows 2 style of boxed borders and title-bar widgets was the "in thing", and the next step from their pseudo-3D widgets was to make everything pseudo-3D...?
Stuck with Win3.11 I looked for other things I could run, that didn't involve me nuking the PC and installing Slackware or otherwise distrupt the "Family PC's" main use; running Lotus 123 for my mother's home accounting business.
So what I found was something that could mimic a "modern" OS, but that still offered 100% of the compatibility, that even an accounting parent could stomach.
IBM Workplace Shell for Windows 3.1x:
https://winworldpc.com/product/ibm-workplace-shell/151
I found it on either the early web, or on a shareware BBS, but the purpose was the same; to convince someone to please, for the love of god, buy IBM OS/2 (not even OS/2 Warp!)
I sure as hell didn't care or want OS/2, but boy did it make my slowly falling behind Win3.11 PC look like the cool kids with their brand new spaceheater Pentiums.
I occasionally reflect back on that time and sorta miss those days, and that computer.. but then I remember it was a Packard Bell sunday flier special "package deal" purchased at Circuit City by a clueless parent in the early 90s, and I was lucky it lasted 4 years before the motherboard blew up and was sent to the recycler. Of course the 2 PSUs, and 3 HDDs dying in that time should have been a hint.
The RAM cost about $750 from a Silicon Valley importer. 1994. That was during a crisis in worldwide memory availability, caused at least in part by a fire that destroyed the only factory that made a chemical required by the semiconductor industry.
Our current supply chain crisis seems worse, but it isn't the first.
It’s funny how our fingers have lost the ability to type “MB of RAM.”
Megabytes. Yes. Oops.
I just bought some old Xeon CPUs on eBay that have 32 MB of cache. They cost rather less than $750.
http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html
But there was a leeser known shell that tried to mimic the Mac OS of the time (System 7/8), MCShell:
http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=752
that was very good.
Now we have full HD screens with 32 bit colors and HDR, powerful GPUs to draw edges as smooth AF and what did we decide to do with all of that? Use 4 colors, fill it up with whitespace and cram everything into squares.
I think the Windows 10 UI was created by a group of depressed people and it really shows.
You’ll likely get some pushback along the lines of ”We already tried that with Windows 8 and everyone hated it”, but keep pushing - quote something about Henry Ford and horses if neccessary
IIRC, they now have guidelines to not assume spacing, icon sizes, etc optimized for touch unless touch is the only interface available.
For me the worst of those is the prevalence of whitespace, and the loss of the grey background.
Grey was the greatest color for UI background, it wasn't overly bright, it won't burn your eyes like modern UIs that shine like a thousand suns, no need for separate "dark theme" because a grey theme is comfortable in all light conditions, it allowed the content color to go in two different directions (if your background is white then your content can only get darker, but if your background is grey your content can be darker or brighter than the background), and it has a clear visual separation between the grey app UI (menus, toolbars, ...) and the white content (E.G. document being edited).
Exactly this happens every time in my company. Designers and PMs wants to « educate » the user and force a strict workflow for them. They never take into account that power users exists.
Sure, most of our users are happy this way because our product replaces shitty and complex excel sheets. But I always wonder about the 1% who took the time to learn and master excel and were fast with their tool. For those people, our product must be a PITA, because their is no other (faster) way to work than the path PMs and designers decided.
But in theory: It's as customisable as you want. You "just" need to write it. The linked 3.11 project is not just a customisation - it's a whole shell just like Cairo.
A little bit later I downloaded 20 or so Slackware floppies and the rest is history…
Ha, I know the pain, I remember being 10 and (literally) dreaming about 16mb or RAM so I could install it!
It would be another two years before I could afford something that could run 95. I think I went straight to 98 IIRC.
The jumps were big back then!
I remember that apparently for desktop applications icons to work it had to launch a process just to be each icon so was quite memory intensive. I seem to recall it also requiring “win32s”
My machine would throw a text mode confirmation prompt over the win95 graphical installer when it tried to write the boot sector as boot sector virus protection and this would freeze the system so windows 95 installation never worked.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...
That way, you'd get all the nice security and hardware support of Windows 11, but without all the crap that Microsoft bundle on.
There are also UI hooks and messaging components.
All this written in Delphi and designed to run atop the humble Windows 3.1 kernel! Source code is available should anyone wish to hack away.
IIRC it was written in Delphi which I was using majorly around the same time so had fun poking around its internals and customising it even further.
I believe it started out as something called Calypso...those memories are vague though.
Great computing memories ...
In hindsight, Windows 95 was the OS to skip, Windows 98 was the one to go for.
Eventually I was able to program something in VB that would dock an "X close" button on the corner of active windows (since for me, that was the one glaring detail missing from the Win 9x experience, and the only other option was pay-ware). It was really messy hackish amateur teenager code, but it worked.
Fun old times.
The only practically useful UX novelties in Windows 95 were the start menu and combining the previously separate file and program manager paradigms.
I suspect that the main reason why it was generally flatter is because it supported monochrome displays. Win95, on the other hand, required VGA 640x480x16 (colors, not bits) as minimum. And of those 16 EGA colors, there were 4 different shades of grey! - a luxury they made full use of in the new 3D widgets.
Fond memories.
This reminds me of the time when I replaced Solaris & Motif on my SUN workstation by Linux and KDE. KDE looked much nicer than Motif, to my young eyes.
The workstation felt faster after the switch, but maybe I was biased. :)