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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a similar shell that ran on DOS in 1994. It was called Baston. It won the 1st place award in a programming contest organized by Microsoft and PC World Magazine in Turkey. I was 18 back then. Here are a couple screenshots:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/241217/159136746-e...

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/241217/159136763-e...

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I was looking through the Windows 95-like desktop screenshots and it reminded me of everything I hated about Windows and why I exclusively used Linux during that time.

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.

Thanks! Interestingly, Motif was based on Windows 3.x look, more precisely "Presentation Manager" look designed for OS/2 and Windows. You can see the similarities in how resize corners and close buttons etc are laid out on windows.

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...

I don't know about "excellence" - I have spoken to a human factors expert who opined that the UI flow of shutting down the computer by clicking a button labeled "Start" is a tad ropey...

I always thought <ctrl><alt><del> to log in was a tad "ropey" as well. Windows somehow decided that starting and stopping were synonymous.

Arguably, you can start a shutdown, so no semantic confusion there :)

>Modern desktops are still better than either option

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.

Nice. A Motif-style DOS shell. Looks good.

Thanks! I didn't know it was called Motif, I'd only seen screenshots of workstations in UnixWorld magazine, and I'd loved the Motif style the most. There were also OpenLook and NextSTEP screenshots in the issues I had :)

Very nice. Reminds me a lot of PC GEOS:

Version 1.2:

http://toastytech.com/guis/geos12.html

Version 2.0:

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/gwe2

Thanks! You're right, looks very similar indeed. I guess they based their looks on Motif too.

I think you're right.

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...?

The design really looks solid - do you remember where you drew inspirations from?

Cok guzel, helal olsun :)

Yes, a couple issues of UnixWorld magazine my brother had given me. I saw the workstation screenshots and was so enamored with them that I was obsessed with writing a GUI library. That was how FatalVision was born very briefly. I was specifically impressed with how cool OSF/Motif windows looked hence the look I picked here. https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision

ve tesekkurler :)

Nice to see `ssg` here. :)

- Another Turkish expat living in the same city as you do

:wave: :)

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