A Tribute to the Windows 3.1 “Hot Dog Stand” Color Scheme (2005) | Hacker News Reader

A Tribute to the Windows 3.1 “Hot Dog Stand” Color Scheme (2005)

blog.codinghorror.com

31 pointsecliptik22 comments

Remember when theming options for computer interfaces were more than just a choice between bespoke "dark" and "light" modes?

Computers are apparently not powerful enough to do that today. Go on, fire up Windows 95 in a VM and be utterly amazed at how responsive it is compared to your current Desktop and it has vastly more themeability. This is the future we have made for ourselves.

> Computers are apparently not powerful enough to do that today. Go on, fire up Windows 95 in a VM and be utterly amazed at how responsive it is compared to your current Desktop and it has vastly more themeability

A long time ago computers were mostly used to run local, trusted, programs. Now they run remote, untrusted, code and this is considered a feature. And this remote code needs a powerful machine that's why the interface is kept to a minimum.

It’s a situation where developers joylessly insist that a user’s preferences and control over the interface of the computer they use for hours each day aren’t a worthwhile thing to consider in application development, leading to efforts like the slow de-prioritisation and extinguishing of user-set theme support in GNOME.

Enormous shame, really - there’s real value in customisation support.

One of the reasons I like Linux and its window managers. Not only are current Windows themes limited, they also are inconsistent. It hurts my eyes to look at title bars staying white when everything else is in dark mode. That actually gave me a reason to purchase a WindowBlinds license and relive the 90s skinning craziness.

You say that like Linux doesn't have its own issues of inconsistent GUIs. KDE offers lots of theming options but GNOME has majority and offers none.

Also both toolkits today are still less responsive than Win32.

Yeah, Xfce was nice when they were still using GTK2, but with the change to GTK3 things are kinda inconsistent.

> be utterly amazed at how responsive it is compared to your current Desktop

I would hope so, it's running on hardware much more powerful than what it was designed for.

So the real question is: what are modern UIs doing that is justifying them being so much slower on the same hardware? We've got orders of magnitude more powerful hardware in exchange for orders of magnitude less responsive UI. Why?

The way I remember it, Windows 95 wasn't all that responsive on typical hardware of the day.

I don't have access to a windows machine right now, but if nothing else I'd bet there's just a lot more things trying to run at the same time, and it's not that the UI is slower, it's that the OS is doing more things.

> I don't have access to a windows machine right now, but if nothing else I'd bet there's just a lot more things trying to run at the same time

People who say this have no idea how much more powerful computers are today. My system is currently using 9 of 32GB and the processor is running 1% of its total capacity over 6 cores. Why does it take more an an imperceptible amount of time for a new Explorer Window to appear?

The sad thing is that this blog post is older than Windows 3.1 was when this blog post was written.

Oh, I'm...I'm going to need a minute.

Heck, Windows 95 is now closer to the Intel 4004 microprocessor than to today.

And Windows 10 and eleven are closer to Windows 1.0 than Windows 95.

Why are computers so serious now?

The mystery and the whimsy appears to have gone from all modern UI design.

Lurid colour schemes like this are at fun and eye catching, even if the numbers of people who actually use it seriously was low, but are a simple way to demonstrate the configurability of your windowing/user interface toolkit

You can’t make an in-joke when there is no in-group anymore. Software could be whimsical when computer users were a small number and could be expected to have been familiarised with a culture where this sort of funny aside could be understood.

No away everyone and their parents is using a computer. For most, it’s seen as something unavoidable but slightly baffling. You can’t expect these users to get it if you do something silly. It’s just going to create confusion.

Born in the late 80s so I came of age with computing around 1996. I remember the first PC we had, intel 100MHz processor, 16MB RAM, 1GB hard drive, Windows 95. Dad paid almost $2000 in 1995 money for it, and it was a huge deal.

I have to assume my fondness for this GUI is tied in with my personal nostalgia and memory of computing at that time: How mysterious and fun it was, clicking through the menus, wondering what the difference between a briefcase and a folder was, and trying to browse the network neighborhood.

Of course, with the lack of connectivity and how niche the Internet was then, it was all so much less commercial, so much more naive. Magical.

Taking inspiration from that theme, there is also Hot Dog Linux: https://hotdoglinux.com/

Here's the rest of the Win3.1 color schemes: https://imgur.com/a/SsVYqM1

That's quite interesting to see. I didn't have a colour monitor at the time when I was using Win3, only got one when I upgraded to Win98.

VScode users can enjoy this theme: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=somekitt...

(I haven't tried it.)

"Enjoy"

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