Crazy that this was only 2 years away from Windows 95.
[1] https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_Usability_Testing_Build...
[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42...
[3] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20030910_053_...
The image is really fascinating to me. The whole taskbar paradigm we're familiar with today started life as what sounds like a quick hack. Draw a bar that draws the contents of a folder in a narrow bar format. Later extend it to hold running applications instead.
Can I have that? Please!
Firefox won't open full-screen if started in X without a window manager.
I have a Linux laptop without X or Wayland. It's mostly for CLI and TUI applications, but I do have some framebuffer applications like fbpdf.
There are a lot of little annoyances, many of which could be fixed with a proper Linux configuration, though others require improvement to the applications.
The framebuffer versions of graphical programs are unfortunately clunky compared against the conventional versions. And I'm disappointed that they don't work when called from tmux or Midnight Commander, or at least I haven't figured out how to make them work.
Some key combinations don't seem to work and I haven't been able to figure out why for all of them yet.
I miss having a unified clipboard.
I've also become more adept at Midnight Commander and its built in editor, diff tool, and viewer. Though this exposes some issues, for example: If a file is edited with F4 configured to be mcedit, then I can switch between the editor and file manager with the screen list (Alt-`). But if I open mcedit from the command line or user menu, then the screen list will only be for that mcedit run and not include any other screens open. I rarely use the Midnight Commander screen list outside of this specific computer.
(As for why I have this computer, it's to have a distraction-free setup. It works nicely for that purpose.)
firefox -geometry 1024x768+0+0
does not work ?
DOS did what it had to do. For coding you could start up emacs (and ctrl-z somehow magically could drop you in a command.com shell that you could exit from to go back to emacs; I think there was a DOS interrupt to allow applications to start sub-shells like that?). And otherwise (i.e. most of the time for most of us) you just booted and started a game and then when you were done playing turned off the computer.
Anyway I must admit, many years later, that many games (and some applications) around 1990 were definitely better on an Amiga. DOS games for some time were rarely the best ports. But I never used an Amiga enough to learn if I liked the operating system much. I did buy Amiga Forever some year ago and that comes with a few pre-configured disk images with AmigaOS and various applications, but I am barely able to use that at all since I have no idea how to use it. It would be fun to play with some day.