Historical workstation desktop interface screenshots
typewritten.org
typewritten.org
Why did Linux so thoroughly abandon that look? Almost everything that works on Linux theme sites is...flat. FLAT. It's ALL FLAT.
The UX feels like a bulky and weird variant of CDE, and I hate CDE.
Icons and widgets consume too much space for no reason, and the entire UI feels complicated and involved for no appreciable benefit.
I still think the pinnacle was BeOS, and that’s because it felt like a refined Mac System 7.
It should be in any self-respecting package repository.
It doesn't work with Wayland afaik, but I wouldn't consider that a bad thing.
I largely agree, though using drag and drop with touchpads (or touchscreens) is a bit of a chore, as is with large or multi-monitor setups. Sometimes you have to pre-arrange your windows before you drag and drop or you run the risk of dragging and dropping in the wrong place.
It was so much easier when all you had was 512x342 to work in.
Having been playing a lot of the new Zelda game, I'm now convinced that I should be able to drag-and-drop files by wiggling the mouse randomly around an object until it gets picked up, and then not having to hold anything until I click again to put it down.
> Sometimes you have to pre-arrange your windows before you drag and drop or you run the risk of dragging and dropping in the wrong place.
Stupid pro-tip that nobody should need but here it is anyway: on macOS, you can three-finger-swipe-up with your index+middle+ring finger while "holding" the drag with your thumb, to get into Mission Control; then hover over the correct window for a while, which will close Mission Control and bring that window into focus; and then drop.
NeXT workstations had 1120×832.
• Graphical User Interface Gallery <http://toastytech.com/guis/>
• GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery <https://guidebookgallery.org/>
• Museum of UI <https://ui.codexpanse.com/>
• The History of User Interfaces <https://history.user-interface.io/>
Some time ago a fellow NH user has proposed an interesting idea to build an ML UI transformer, which will sit on top of the broken MS Windows 2030 OS and transform the UI experience in real-time to the UI of my choice.
Maybe spoof the RDP protocol?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM95
Modern version:
https://github.com/mintsuki/fvwm95
IceWM has an OK-ish Windows 95 theme, and might be easier to find:
I don’t want an “experience”, I just want a button that’s visually distinguished from the background that responds at 120 fps!
Think about it: windows "iconified" to the desktop, and the icons for many programs and document types were intended to look like (a stylized version of) what the program's main window would look like if shrunk down to that size. You had windows inside windows; and in programs like Program Manager, you could open up icons inside windows to get more windows inside your windows.
All they needed to do is to make the windows that open up inside windows, open up embedded within the window that previously contained their icon (i.e. recursive MDI, rather than sibling MDI), and it'd have been true ZUI.
Of course, that would have been an awful idea on hardware without the ability to render anti-aliased resampled images in real-time, nor any input device that could implement an analogue pinch-to-zoom gesture.
But what I'm saying is, you could design an OS around "what Windows 3.1 was trying to do" today, and it'd be pretty cool.
http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-p...
Apart from deeply hating PCs, which is understandable.
The MicroVax was sort of the secondary, older system but it intrigued me, and I hacked on it, securing some career advancement along the way. I'd already saved our reputation and revenue bigtime by overhauling our authentication server. When word got around that I'd reconfigured the Ultrix kernel to my liking, I feared a reprimand but received a promotion to sysadmin and a 33% raise.
The SparcStation 2 was the jewel of the office and its printer was the bane of my existence. There was a storage pedestal and a SPARC Laser printer; this system was in a triple role as a desktop workstation, office print server, and customer/public Internet services of whatever sort existed before WWW.
Now the SPARC Printer used Display Postscript as its engine, and that's why I'm ranting about it here on this article. Display Postscript-based printers are like WinModems: they're essentially dumb devices, and IIUC, they appear somewhat like a monitor to the host system. So the Postscript engine runs on the host and then zaps rendered pages out to the device.
This is great in theory, and it's great in practice if you've got a dedicated print server and your printer never jams or fouls physically. Well guess what. We were heavy users on that thing, because everyone in the United States was phoning us asking how to get on the Internet, and we offered a free guide for that. So we printed a new copy and stuffed it in an envelope for every request!
When the printer hung, being dependent on the host system, its engine daemon hung in Device Wait on the server, and there was no way to unwedge it until we rebooted. So we'd all stop work, kick off the desktop user, reboot it, get the printer back, and try to pick up where we left off.
Upon promotion, I was provisioned with a SPARCstation LX, and I promptly eschewed OpenWindows in favor of twm.I ran rc, mh, Emacs, and sometimes I would fire up NCSA Mosaic, because these weirdos on the Internet were starting to "blog" about what they ate for lunch.
A lot of the apps used then are still around, or have been succeeded by something very similar.
Maybe the biggest difference was the prevalence of emulation in the mid-to-late 90s, as the UNIX workstation was losing out to desktop PCs and Macs.
If you looked at my SparcStation at the time, I’d have been running Apple’s Macintosh Emulation Environment next to everything else: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Application_Enviro...
We sorely need a state-ful GUI markup standard so we can get desktop-friendly GUI's over HTTP instead of rely on binary, proprietary, and/or DOM-JS-bloat tools.
I kept hoping the web would eventually grow decent GUI standards, but it never did. Social networks and dancing-cat videos got all the attention, not real-work-GUIs. DOM is inherently the wrong tool for the job, and fixing it would break backward compatibility.
More on DOM-fail: https://www.reddit.com/r/CRUDology/comments/12jt7i1/the_four...
The "desktop" is mostly a solved problem, because it's just the thing you encounter BEFORE you get to your applications; flippin' openbox with a few minor addtional tweaks is fine for 99% of people.
They should have included Microsoft Bob. It was a huge failure economically but at least they tried something else.
Wait till you see the Ribbon.
And although I never used it, I have to say NextStep 1.0 aged rather well in comparison with many others GUIs in the list.
Wait what! That one slipped by me. MacOS on Intels and Windows on PowerPC feels like upside-down 90s.
(as if I'm one to talk: almost all my billable work occurs in terminal windows, much of it on the command line, which —pace cursor addressing— goes back to the 1960s)