Why does part of the Windows 98 Setup program look older than the rest? (2020)
retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
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This is really wrong. I wanted to read that discussion.
For some reason, you'll need to be logged into Stack Exchange to view that.
Screen-grab: https://i.stack.imgur.com/6aalu.jpg
So, thanks for the screengrab! I'm always a bit annoyed by people cleaning comments like this to move it to chat when stack exchange chat is so bad and somehow always has messed up timestamps.
I am not a developer and so don't use it much, but it's occasionally handy. I guess I need to try to score more points to make it a bit more interesting, huh.
I remember I was blown away the first time I installed from an ubuntu live cd.
I'm trying not to have a panic attack that "Windows 98" unambiguously counts as retrocomputing now though.
Oh you can totally go up to Windows XP for this denomination. Some would argue you may even go to 7.
Windows 10 is 9-10 years old and nobody ever cared or will ever be nostalgic about Windows 8 which is 12 years old so it’s not unreasonable to consider anything before that, "Retro".
The only thing keeping me on Windows really was gaming, and all of that works perfectly for me thanks to Steam.
Yes! YES.
> it's honestly a nice visual improvement over 10 imo
O_O
Good hypothetical gods.
Long term Windows user here, before I defected to Linux (supplemented with Mac OS X) in about 2002. I started on Windows 2.01 in 1988.
The best version of Windows ever was 2000, and it's been accelerating downhill since then. The last version that was pleasant to use, and the best-looking, was Windows 7. Win8.0 brought in the flat look that destroyed all visual appeal. Win 8.1 reinstated a broken crippled copy of the Start menu.
Win10 formalised that and it was minimally usable.
Now 11 is the one that I simply cannot bear to use at all.
Broken taskbar, glamorised into uselessless, pinned at the bottom when it should be at the side. Fitt's law making it easy to find the Start menu in a corner, a big easy target, broken: it now moves around floating somewhere left of bottom centre. It has advertising in it, in a paid product! WTAF? Ribbons everywhere, destroying the usability of the world-beating Explorer UI that the entire industry copied. The return of the deeply useless desktop widgets. The b0rked up MS web based video-conferencing tool is always there, always open, although I never ever use it. It constantly nags me about low free space in my never-used OneDrive, and I can't turn it off.
It is a horrible broken sh1tshow of an OS, the end of a proud dynasty.
I am really seriously shocked to find anyone might prefer it.
The UX for windows 7, 10 and 11 is literally the same for me except for some details. I press start and type a query and hit enter as soon as I see what I need appearing (i.e. immediately). I don't really care where that menu appears and I prefer my task bar on the bottom. Yes it looks a bit different across versions but it's not something I cannot get used to.
Prefer it? Not really. The core issue is they keep changing the GUI metaphors. Now at this point if you click on the right program you may see stuff from win3.11 all the way up to win11. With some GUI's stuck in 'the window is a max of 640x480 mode' and is crap to use on a even semi recent computer. Then is as tradition MS moves junk around into non logical places. Even the task manager has had junk moved around for no real reason and it really does not look better or worse than the win10 version it was however an 'ok' improvement upon the old win9x style.
The win8 debacle was them not testing it on users and thinking everyone would have a touch tablet for windows?! It shows. Win9x and WinXP you can see they did their usability studies. Then just decided to not do it anymore. Discoverability is terrible, usability is skewed across at least 7 different windows idioms and things you are used to doing just randomly disappear and reappear somewhere else (if you are lucky). Then tools are deprecated and replaced with new shiny but do the exact same thing but not quite and usually surrounded by techno bable. Just fix the old ones and update it please. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecat...
The only reason I still use it is I am fairly committed to this eco system. Moving to another one is possible but not something I really want to do. Just upgrading a computer is a painful thing for me to do at this point much less changing to another OS. It gets more and more tempting as WINE gets better and better.
At some point the pain of moving will probably be less than the pain of these constant borkedness-upgrades.
And quite possibly that point is already somewhere in your past.
You gotta be joking.
IMO, Windows 11 is trying desperately to look like MacOS, which is probably the greatest bug Microsoft has ever introduced into Windows besides EternalBlue and MS08-067.
Microsoft is completely ignoring a huge market segment that chooses Windows because it's not MacOS.
Windows 7 with the Classic theme was hands-down the best Windows UI. The modern shift to flatness and hiding information/options is terrible UX. It absolutely destroys discoverability when it's not clear what elements are interactable. But it looks "clean", I guess, so somehow people prefer it.
Yes, but they're adding "helpful" hint dialogs that clutter the screen to compensate that loss of discoverability, so it's all good.
/s
All the spyware, forced updates and restarts causing loss of work forcing you to wrestle your own computer into submission via tweaking a plethora of knobs and levers that MS subverts with updates.
But terminals...
As for spyware and subverted preferences, Apple does it worse; and many Linux updates will carelessly break DE stuff too... so it's all much of a muchness to me.
It is still annoying to deal with but manageable especially on single boot machines.
This is highly subjective, but I'd consider Windows 7 as retro at this point. As of 2024, Windows 7 is 14 years old. Windows 95, for instance, was already 14 years old the year when Windows 7 was released (2009). And Windows 95 was already seen as "retro" by that time.
I am typing this on Windows 7 and lots of programs e.g. utorrent still produce new versions which run fine on Windows 7, so I'm thinking many of the older Windows APIs are still in use and haven't changed much.
Whereas Windows 95 vs Windows 7 are very different architecturally with one being clearly superior to the other, and also Windows 95 was at the start of its series and got more mature with Windows 98 etc. and Windows 7 was already mature.
> For one, it still has about half a percent desktop share (60+% in Armenia). While this may sound small, it's still a huge number of everyday users — not to mention all the appliances, kiosks and other control systems running XP.
Per Statcounter, XP makes up 0.39% of desktop Windows machines now, which is more than Windows 8. I'm not sure what to conclude from that.
Windows Vista was a paid upgrade from XP with increased system requirements and poor performance on low-end supported hardware.
Oh no. The manual stated I could simply go online to find the required drivers on the new-fangled world wide web.
Which, incidentally, was why I had bought the adapter in the first place.
Floppy is the only universal driver the installer can count of having for storage media, besides the media it installing itself. I always thought it would be smarter if this process allowed you to insert a CD temporarily in the same drive keeping the installer in memory.
I have definitely used OS installers that allowed/required CD swaps, though. Maybe Ubuntu at one point? Now that's a slick setup process. Opening Firefox to read the orange site while your OS installs on the same computer is a great trick.
By the time XP rolled around, CDROMs were common place.
The older style alternative was to wait for special "hardware update" release of the operating system you wanted to install.
I've installed NT4 god knows how many times. I'm very familiar with the process.
NT4 was magical, I remember reading on the jewel case "for 386, Pentium Pro, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha" or something like that, and the instructions on how to boot the installer - with only PC referencing a boot disk (and having done so before ElTorito that was truly magical for me)
At some point it would eject and ask you to put in the Windows you were upgrading from, and you could just put the same CD back in and it happily counted it.
The vocabulary that people came up with in a time of Star Trek: Voyager and Fast & the Furious…
Next time I was blown away with installs was when I unbricked my pixel phone from Chrome!
That was the highlight of my year and I showed it to all my schoolmates.
File Manager, or winfile.exe, was the predecessor to Explorer's file management aspects. You can use it on Windows 10 and 11 (and all the others) if you want to.
Program Manager, or progman.exe, was the predecessor shell to Explorer. It was included with Windows through Windows XP SP1 before finally being stubbed in SP2 and removed altogether in Vista. You can probably grab the binary from XP SP1 and run it in newer Windows versions, though.
The Aero Basic theme is particularly horrible though, I do wonder if that particularly unpleasant shade of cyan for the borders was picked to punish those who didn't activate Windows, or were to poor to afford Home Premium.
In the end it's one of those weird forgotten things, like the Windows 3.x colour picker dialogue that still lurks in a few places like Wordpad (although MS are "solving" that).
I think it's probably an artifact of drawing the window in a particular way using the Win32 API.
For example, you can also see the "Aero Basic" style if you do a Control.DrawToBitmap on a Form control. (According to the winforms source, `DrawToBitmap` just sends a WM_PRINT message.)
I am actually mildly surprised it didn't change in Windows 10, but maybe that part of the codebase never got updated. Who knows :)
(Side note: there's also this article[1] from 2004 that describes creating your own custom "designer" type application. It's pretty old, but it might be interesting nontheless.)
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2004...
On Windows 200 and XP you could install additional recovery console - which in later version has become a default addition to the system
I remember ME looking so shiny, but in the end had some childhood age problems
I live in the EU and only about 1/10 sites have a banner that show up for me.
Cookie notices are at least easy to get rid of, there exist various adblocker filter lists specifically for that. That popup though...
I assume this is the one you’re talking about https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
I was curious, went to the end (page 699!) and it’s pretty interesting. But obviously it’s hard to find the important ones.
You’d have to fix it by removing the file within BASIC using the built in command (KILL I think) then saving it in uppercase.
Can’t say MS considered it a bug or simply chose to not fix it for backward compatibility. It existed in quite late versions.
In early days, computers just don't do lowercase.
When you do case-insensitivty, storing names in uppercase make sense if all older filesystem are uppercase only
It's like how people write SQL with uppercase keywords, but not any other language. I suppose it's learning by emulation and then old habits die hard.
For Python, I'd follow PEP8 [1], as it is more important to follow the local programming culture, even if it has some warts. Otherwise, programs from multiple people would quickly become messy, and learning and code reuse between projects becomes harder.
I didn't do much lisp, but considered the builtins as library functions I theoretically could have written myself. So they were lower case, as coherent with all other names of functions etc...
Can't comment on Lua, I've done <100 lines of it and forgot basically all of it.
I used to write BASIC keywords in upper case and vars lowercase (GOTO longlongago)
Tradeoffs, tradeoffs, tradeoffs, as always. I presume SQL has not much consistency in formatting and casing, so I grew my own convention.
[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/#prescriptive-naming-conven...
Common Lisp is case-folding to upper case by default so DEFUN and defun are the same; both tokens denote a symbol whose name is the character string "DEFUN".
Symbol names themselves are sensitive; "DEFUN", "Defun" and "defun" are all different character strings and different symbol names. (find-symbol "defun") will not find the defun symbol.
In Common Lisp, you can carry on the sane coding convention as described by the grandparent comment, whereby built-ins like DEFUN and LET are written in upper case, and your own identifiers are mixed case.
People have syntax coloring in other languages.
Pardon the breach of rules for a moment: IT'S EASIER TO READ THIS THAN it's easier to read this.
If readability of lower-case was the issue we would write all variable and function names in upper case, even in languages that have lower-case keywords.
Secondly, upper-casing some parts is not about global readability; it's about contrasting code on monochrome displays.
The PARTS IN CAPITALS are the parts the language (compiler or whatever) defines and must have spelled exactly that way. The parts in lowercase are the names, symbols etc. that the programmer defines rather than the compiler or OS.
Personally that is how I learned and even now, some 40 years later, I find that C-style everything in lower case is MUCH less readable for me than mixed CAPS and minuscule.
I'm just wondering what the utility is today for people who have questioned it but decided to go with uppercase for parts of the code anyway.
As someone else said, if one is prone to confusing keywords with identifiers, syntax highlighting has existed for many years now, and solves that problem MORE elegantly than INTERSPERSING a few SHOUTED words in the CODE.
I am not a programmer, but in the last decade I worked for 2 of the biggest Linux vendors writing documentation in DocBook XML. Both companies followed the "docs as code" approach so we used programmers' editors, programmers' version control systems, etc.
I don't really want multicoloured code. I find that visually intrusive. I prefer fewer colours in my UI, not more. I find editors that indicate syntax with colour to be loud, irritating, and annoying.
I find the simple traditional look of black on white, as humans have been using for text for millennia, and capitals for keywords and minuscule for the human-written parts, easier on the eyes and brain.
I am not telling you that you should use it. I am not telling you that your preferences are wrong. I am just telling you that yours don't match mine and I prefer mine.
You seem to feel that my preferences are wrong and I am wrong and want to tell me that.
IT WAS A dark AND stormy night; THE rain fell IN torrents, except AT occasional intervals, WHEN IT WAS checked BY A violent gust OF wind WHICH swept UP THE streets (FOR IT IS IN London THAT OUR scene lies), rattling along THE house-tops, AND fiercely agitating THE scanty flame OF THE lamps that struggled AGAINST THE darkness. THROUGH one OF THE obscurest quarters OF London, AND among haunts little loved BY THE gentlemen OF THE police, A man, evidently OF THE lowest orders, WAS wending HIS solitary way. HE stopped twice OR thrice AT different shops AND houses OF A description correspondent WITH THE appearance OF THE quartier IN WHICH THEY WERE situated, AND tended inquiry FOR SOME article OR ANOTHER WHICH DID NOT seem easily TO BE met WITH.
(The verbs be and do get capitalized in all their conjugations, because they have special roles in the grammar, making them keywords.)
If typography for prose were like this, people would be used to reading it, and more code in more programming languages would look like that.
The on the other hand, people have experimented with syntax coloring for parts of speech. That actually looks quite bad and detracts from readability; yet lots of coding is done that way.
Code is laid out in certain two dimensional ways that prose is not, and the keywords that get emphasized (whether through CAPS or color or both) occur in certain predictable visual structures rather than as soup ingredients in a wall of text.
Formatting of and typography of prose are not absolutely linked.
You are trying to apply your personal preferences, which are the trendy ones, as if they were absolute rules. They aren't.
(This is highly offensive, BTW.)
Also, I don't think you have read much 17-18th century literature, because people did do things similar to that... much as German still today capitalises all Nouns, English too put a capital Letter on all Nouns in the Language just a few Centuries ago.
I dislike the PEP8 style for python, but I use it anyways, mostly.
Lowercase letters requiring descenders (g, j, p, q, y) might be relevant.
When we read text, we don't read letters, we read words. So familiar word shapes help reading text more quickly. Lowercase letters have more distinct shapes (due to ascenders and descenders) so they make for more distinct word shapes. Uppercase word shapes are not only less familiar (because most text you've read is not all-caps) but also less distinct because they lack descenders and all have roughly the same height.
So in other words, writing keywords as in SQL in uppercase can be more readable because a) it indicates it's that language (which can be helpful in mixed-language source code), b) the keywords usually being written in uppercase make them easier to recognize without having to be familiar with the words from other contexts (this might actually be an advantage for people who don't read as much English text) and c) this sets keywords apart from variable and attribute names without syntax highlighting.
For filenames and such there is no such advantage which is why you only occasionally see all-caps used for special files (e.g. LOCK, VERSION, README) where the uppercase text is intended to stand out from other file names and usually follows a naming convention that makes the word shape common enough to be easy to recognize.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.htm
I feel like the style of the UI, though dated, helps a lot: the borders and hierarchy force you to think about how UI components are related, not just where they are on screen. Unlike, e.g. modern Firefox tabs, which just feel like weird floating text with arbitrary ugly borders that never seem to feel less alien no matter how long you use them. They're not literally unusable... but they're not particularly good, especially compared to what we had before.
This gives me hope for projects like SerenityOS. A bit of oldschool UI design with some modern amenities. In theory, this seems like a good idea.
The UIs of today are largely designed by people who have experienced GUIs for their entire lives, and assume that everyone is already familiar with conventions. Focus testing is seen as slow and expensive, so designers lean on A/B testing and telemetry, randomly breaking live user experiences in small batches to creep toward local maxima. Needing a help system is viewed as old-fashioned; users should paw at UIs like a puzzle box to discover features. Computers and displays are powerful enough for every application to be a unique "branded experience".
Leopard introduced the pop-over and HUD elements in 2007, and I think this was the last of intuitive UI that I’ve encountered.
But it is a difficult balance. One has to define metrics that tell apart "user doesn't incorporate solution in their workflow" (bad) and "user completes their work using solution quickly" (good).
Personally I'd probably take some version of Mac OS 8/9 as peak mouse driven GUI design. The third party app ecosystem in Mac OS was a lot better about respecting UI conventions on the platform IMHO, Windows app UIs were all over the place for me during this period as they transitioned out of the DOS era.
Simple things, like how installing apps was just dragging them to a folder, not the plethora of setup.exe examples found on Windows, were pretty nice back then on the Mac UI.
There are of course lots of things that sucked about old Mac OS then - memory management etc - but the UI design was great.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms997507...
I really like all the UI changes introduced in 2000. Especially the color palette: that subtle change from strong gray in 9x to lighter one worked pretty well. With all the gradients on icons, preview pane in Explorer, Tahoma as default UI font and introduction of transparency/fade elements I forget 98 SE quickly. And of course there was the stability of the NT - back then the price was lack of compatibility with games.
How much did 128MB of RAM cost in 1999? According to a Reddit thread that Copilot found, about $370 in 2020 dollars[1]. Copilot also dug up another thread[2] where people reminisced about RAM capacity and pricing in the 90s.
So in very basic terms, 128MB of RAM (let alone more!) back then would be like buying 128GB of RAM today. Most people simply aren't going to buy ~$400 of RAM just like that, especially when upgrade cycles were also much shorter than today.
There was a very practical reason Windows 9x existed alongside Windows NT until XP merged the lines in 2001 when 256~512MB of RAM and more became much more affordable.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_12...
I do understand. I was there. My personal PCs from that time had 16MB (a getting old AMD 5x86 133) and 32MB (Celeron 300A w/ the 450Mhz "mod"), and I ran Linux and Windows 95/98 on them. I didn't get W2K at home until late 2001 and that was only because I splurged.
Windows 2000 was a ridiculous luxury item for home users at the time, but for business PCs it was a real winner. It was so much more stable than Windows 95/98. The "we build PCs" shop I worked at did a good job of convincing business Customers to spend the extra money for stability. Only a minority bit on the idea, but people definitely talked about seeing fewer reboots and better multitasking w/ the W2K machines. It helped sell itself.
(We also did least-privilege user accounts all the way back in the NT 4.0 days. "Cleaning up" the malware of the day was so easy because, by and large, you could just blow away the user's profile and start with a fresh registry. Since the user didn't have Administrator rights making machine-wide changes was "off limits" for most malware of the time.)
I was a cheap ass but I remember ponying up for extra ram and switching to 2000 quite early which is something I never do these days.
You said "decent amount of RAM" in a very nonchalant fashion, so I felt that maybe a reorienting of the focal lens was necessary. RAM today is so mundane everyone wastes it without a care in the world[1], but it wasn't always this way.
For old computers maybe. I never actually heard of anyone doing an upgrade-install of Windows though.
I had 64MB in ... probably 1998 and we weren't even a computer-focused household. And your second link seems to back that up ("early 1999"), and that was a major improvement that basically obsoleted our old '95 computer but managed to last until well into the XP era ... huh, which is actually only the same 3 years apart, though we got SP1 which was a year after that.
It's kind of weird how Microsoft released a different OS each year for 4 years in a row.
You should read the whole thread, then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39986341
Some users had to install DOS, then Win3, then Win9x, just to get to (say) Win98SE.
It was a thing.
IBM sold an entire edition of OS/2 Warp that required you to already have Windows 3.1 installed in order to use Windows compatibility. It was called the "Red Spine" edition:
98 to 98 SE to 2000 to XP and back to 2000 was all in A short time.
I ran Win95 in 1995 for a few months on 4MB of RAM.
This was actually possible to do all the way up to and including Win7, which even had the icon taskbar working in that "Windows Classic" theme. And it was very good design - pretty easy on the eyes and not distracting, but you could also tell which element is which easily at a glance (unlike these days, when everything is flat).
However, the nice thing about the Windows Classic theme is that you could change all of the colors arbitrarily, including the bezels.
It's so sad to look back and remember how insanely customizable desktop UI was back then, compared to what we have now. In Win11, you can't even have a vertical taskbar anymore.
But having that UI show up in 640 VGA because it couldn’t find drivers would make you angry, and you’d take it out on it.
Likewise if you wanted the non XP (Luna I think it was called?) styles you could just stop the theme service and it was effectively win2k style.
Literally the exact same kernel if you count XP x64 Edition. Even the exact same Windows Updates apply to both. :)
But yeah, Windows XP (32-bit; NT 5.1) and Server 2003 (NT 5.2) were pretty close. The latter was pretty much "XP Server Edition", albeit some significant kernel changes were made, especially to improve network performance.
It was the only time that the client and server versions of NT had diverged. Granted, the Windows Server team didn't feel like NT 6.0 was ready for the primetime when Vista launched, but instead of having two branches of the operating system again, Windows Server 2008 was launched identifying as "Service Pack 1" from the get-go, with Windows Vista's SP1 updating the OS to include all of the underlying improvements made for Server 2008. From that point forward, they were the same, including the same Windows Updates. It's also the point that Windows Vista got all of its technical flaws fixed. (Reputation flaws not withstanding, it wouldn't be until Windows Vista SP3 aka Windows 7, that the reputation would get reset...)
Driver compatibility was terrible, as you might expect, but it could support a vast amount of memory (relative to XP). I used the base O/S only to run VMware Workstation, and then ran small instances of XP, each dedicated to a task like audio, video, etc, on top of that. Along with FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux.
That was my daily driver until late 2010. Solid as a rock.
I had a Customer who usd it to run Unigraphics CAD. The Dell Precision machines they had with factory-loaded XP64 were fine. Trying to get their random other machines to run it w/ working audio, video, and chipset drivers was a pain.
I never ran it as a desktop OS myself. I installed plenty of the server version it was based on (W2K3 x64) but those boxes always had standard VGA drivers, no audio, and sometimes a RAID controller driver, but that was usually it.
The gradient on the "My Computer" icon was also very satisfying: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows...
It did not use a lot of resources, I was a bit of a tweaker back then and I just shut down any services I didn't need for home use and it was absolutely fine on 64MB.
It ran all games and applications that I tried to run.
I HATED the Windows XP UI, never installed it. Why install something slower and uglier? 2000 was way better out of the box without ever experiencing issues in terms of compatibility.
It's true Vista had a ton of nice new features under the hood, but the inconsistency in terms of UX of every Windows version after 2000 felt extremely off-putting.
Everything deteriorated once they went to the flat design. I need to find out which consultancy made the recommendation and everyone followed.
And for companies that aren’t leaders? Many of them want to be seen as such anyway, or at least not seen as irrelevant. (We might remember how X started popping up in all manner of names when XP came out.)
To some degree there is room for this as long as function remains a primary goal, however we might reasonably argue that the current competition in technology is to look sleek, not to actually empower end users, leading to a design language that’s main purpose is to look nice but not be ultimately useful.
NT 4 reorganised the kernel and that badly impacted stability. Win2K fixed that.
I still remember the day my father installed Windows 3.1, pure magic. I have never used any GUI OS before that (that was DOS and then we went straight for Win 3.1).
I was building a PC for a broke mate of mine, and all I had to spare was about 40MB of RAM. The choice was either Windows ME, which didn't run great in that little, or NT4, for which it was quite generous.
NT4 looked like Win95 and it was quite solid. No power management, no USB support, not FAT32, but it didn't crash. WinME did all them but was not very stable.
NT changed significantly over its lifetime. I deployed and supported all versions in production.
NT 3.1: first release. Big, slow, no long filenames on FAT, needed a crazy 32MB of RAM in 1993, meaning a £5000+ PC. But very solid, and great networking.
NT 3.5: LFNs on FAT. Bit smaller and faster and more stable.
NT 3.51: a classic release. Smaller and faster still. I ran my home fileserver on NT 3.51 for years, in 8MB of RAM. Slow on the console, fine over a 10Mb/sec LAN. Absolutely rock solid, very quick.
NT 4: finally you get Explorer and the Win95 desktop, but bigger, slower, less stable. No plug'n'play, only very rudimentary power management, little to no useful 3D support. Not much use on laptops. But looked as good as Win95/98 and was as easy to use.
NT 5, AKA "Windows 2000": finally, full power management, full PnP, hotplug, USB, FAT32. All the good stuff that NT4 couldn't do. Bigger, slower, but very solid and worked well.
NT 5.1, AKA "Windows XP": Win2K plus themes, some bundled junk you can't uninstall like Movie Maker. Boots faster, much quicker hibernation/resume... and that is all. Bigger, slower, looks cheap and plastic.
I preferred W2K.
First (and so far last) OS I bought with my own money. Well, as a separate purchase -- have bought a couple of laptops since then. So probably the last OS I'll ever pay for as a purchase of its own.
> NT 5.1, AKA "Windows XP": ... looks cheap and plastic.
There was a "Use Classic look" (or theme, whatever) check-box in the Control Panel that made it look like W95 / NT4 / W2K. Check, problem fixed. That hung around in Vista / W7 too.
> I preferred W2K.
I preferred W7 -- the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?), because after a while they started disabling some of the above-mentioned stuff in the Control Panel. And towards the end not even doing those changes directly in the Registry kept its effect after a reboot. :-(
OS/2 2.0 for me.
> There was a "Use Classic look" (or theme, whatever) check-box
Not exactly, but you could select the unthemed theme, effectively turning themes off, then go into the Services management console and disable the Theming service.
But it was extra work, and most people didn't do it.
In a world where people curate collections of classic icons, e.g.
https://alexmeub.com/projects/windows-98-icons/
... and discuss looks and themes, and GNOME >=40 tries to disable theming, I think it's relevant and legitimate to point the finger at the point the rot set in to the extent that Windows itself adopted themes as standard. As well as them not being very good themes.
(Come back NeXTstep, all is forgiven. NeXT was right: greyscale is adequate for classic beauty.)
> I preferred W7
A different thing, I think.
XP is what drove me off Windows. (I should be grateful for that.) But I tried it last year and to my shock I liked it:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/dangerous_pleasures_w...
Since Vista, the resource footprint of Windows hasn't changed massively. Win7 is Vista point one. Win8 is Vista point two, which makes 7.1 either Vista point 2.1 or point 3.
10 is a bit bigger but it's really 8.1 cleaned up. Call it NT 6.4 or 6.5.
I haven't dug deep into 11 -- I detest it -- but it's only a .1 really.
> the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?)
No idea what this means.
Win7 never even got to SP2.
Is that what I did? Maybe. If that whole "Theming" thing arrived in XP or Vista, I must have been disabling that as just a one-click preliminary to going into the basic "Appearance" Control Panel item -- the same dialog where you'd set border widths, background colours, and menu fonts since Windows 95 (or possibly a sub-dialog thereof, "Advanced" or something) -- to click "use [Classic | Windows 2000 | NT4 | Windows 95 | whatever] look", and then customise it from there, just like in W95. This latter is the only bit I recall with any certainty.
> > the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?)
> No idea what this means. Win7 never even got to SP2.
No, duh, you're right -- I must have gotten it mixed up with XP; that only really stabilised after SP3, didn't it?
So there was no such cut-off for 7; that was functionally fine from the start -- but then after some diffuse amount of time got progressively worse in terms of UI backward compatibility. Which is why I prefer some unspecified "early" iteration of it.
So far, fortunately, I've managed to avoid W11, except for a couple of months at the job I had in the end of 2022. But, sigh, I suppose it can't be avoided forever... :-(
I don't know! The 2 part thing is necessary if you want the performance back. If you only care about it looking like older versions, and don't object to wasting a few hundred MB and a few % of CPU, you don't need to disable the service.
My guide on this is a blind friend of mine, and he is super extra fussy plus plus about system responsiveness and wants the maximum possible performance. :-)
> If that whole "Theming" thing arrived in XP or Vista
There are 2 different things.
XP introduced themes, but they are effectively 2D textures on the old GDI display server.
Vista replaced the GDI with Aero, a compositing window manager that uses a 3D card to render textures onto flat window objects -- a method taken from Apple's Quartz Extreme display server, and also now used in most Linuxes as well. That's how come Vista brought transparency effects in: it's the GPU compositor doing that.
Side-effect: console windows can no longer be toggled to/from full-screen with Alt+Enter. Which was very useful for cleaning up screen corruption, but is rarely needed any more.
> I must have been disabling that as just a one-click preliminary to going into the basic "Appearance" Control Panel item
[Nod]
> No idea what this means. Win7 never even got to SP2.
No, duh, you're right -- I must have gotten it mixed up with XP; that only really stabilised after SP3, didn't it?
[Wiggles head]
SP3 was a big one and the OS at least got a fair bit less insecure after it. That's when the Windows Firewall appeared, IIRC.
> So there was no such cut-off for 7; that was functionally fine from the start
Yeah, but it was just a point-release of Vista, really.
There isn't a lot of difference between Vista + SP1 and Win7. But it had its bad reputation before the SP and never lost it.
> got progressively worse in terms of UI backward compatibility
Oh, my, yes, agreed.
> Which is why I prefer some unspecified "early" iteration of it.
Fair.
> So far, fortunately, I've managed to avoid W11, except for a couple of months at the job I had in the end of 2022. But, sigh, I suppose it can't be avoided forever... :-(
Nope. But I think a community will try to keep 10 alive as long as it can.
W11 feels to me like "Windows for people who don't really know how to use Windows", but then, Office 2007 and all successive versions felt the same: Office for people who don't know how to use Office.
I do know Office. Especially Word, to a less extent Excel. 2007 broke it and it's never got any better.
So I stopped using Office, except for old versions of Word, because LibreOffice doesn't have an outliner.
I don't know why it took me so long to try it. KDE is an excellent steward of this style of user interface.
Also this is on version 5 but they had a major release of 6 recently, and I don't know whether those changes included anything to this widget.
- The lack of overhead required by security and 'features' like querying an internet search when you click the start menu or showing advertising in the calculator or better memory management in general, meant that overall UI response in that era used to be much _MUCH_ faster than it is today. Once upon a time you could operate your O/S with the speed of a Starcraft tournament winner; this simply is not possible any more.
- You could 'queue' commands - clicking the close button on an program and then (before it had finished closing) clicking the minimise button would minimise the program behind it immediately after the closing process finished. In this way you could chain/queue commands rather than being forced to wait for the OS to update between each step.
- Enter and Spacebar did different things. If a prompt had two buttons, one would be outlined with a thick black line that would respond to [Enter], and one would be outlined in a dotted line that would respond to [spacebar]. This is still the case sometimes but is far from ubiquitous.
- The top-left corner of the program was reserved for a 'system' menu used to move/resize the window, or quickly exit with a double-click. Though still used by some MS programs today like Explorer, its usefulness is lessened if not all programs utilise it.
- Don't even get me started on keyboard shortcuts.
These kinds of universally-accepted and _useful_ power-user-oriented design principles are almost absent from UX as it is implemented today.
I don't remember exactly how the resizing and moving as found in the menu worked. Maybe they allowed for resizing/moving without aiming at the relatively small corners or the title screen. But for that I much prefer the traditional Unix style of alt + click/drag anywhere on a window moving the window. Alt + right mouse button similarly resizes it.
That is a feature I have missed on Windows.
I do seem to remember sometimes using a series a key presses to minimize the window through the system menu without using the mouse. But that was also due to not having an actual keyboard shortcut for doing that.
The system window was handy for retrieving windows that had somehow ended up offscreen. Alt-space, M for move, hit an arrow key once, and then the window follows your cursor and ends up on screen by default. Still works in modern versions of Windows - it's somewhat obsolete now you can use Win+arrow keys to move a window around, but it might still be useful if your window has ended up somewhere and you can't figure out where.
Sometimes the Old Magics are still required.
Pretty sure that's already a standard across all Windows version, plus Xfce and KDE have similar menus and the double-click to close feature
Xfce works with most of them.
I would nominate late AmigaOS or BeOS as having a better WIMP UI than any Windows.
Whenever I had to reinstall Windows (which was frequent back in Win98 days), I had to first install DOS from floppy, then Win 3.11 from floppy, then a CD-ROM driver, then Win95 from CD until I could finally install Win98. (at one point I acquired a non-upgrade version of Win95 but it came on 20+ floppies, so the installation was not really much faster).
The end-result was a Win98 installation with a lot of old software lying around as the 'upgrade' installers did not always remove all of the existing items.
I would copy the hard drive contents from one drive to the next each time I bought a new drive, and ultimately that installation survived three complete hardware refreshes and countless interim component upgrades.
Needless to say, there was a LOT of cruft hanging about by the end. From ancient components from old versions of Visual Studio to drivers for early 2000s era scanners. Most of it still ran too, testament to Microsoft’s backwards compatibility.
To clean-install Windows 98 using the Upgrade version, it would accept either 3.1x or 95 installation media. After the verification, it'll proceed to work exactly like the fully-purchased product version, no cruft from an older OS (since the older OS was never installed in the first place).
I know they continued doing this at least up until Windows Vista and 7. Helpful especially since Windows 2000 was a qualifying operating system for Vista upgrade, but a direct upgrade wasn't possible from 2000; it could directly upgrade from XP, though. Windows 7 would restrict the qualifying OSes to XP and Vista, and only allow direct upgrades from Vista. (Never tried newer versions of Windows, can't say what 8/10/11 do, but I have little reason to believe the practice has changed.)
Well, from the unactivated Vista, you can run Vista setup, and "upgrade" on top of itself. That was enough for the OS to flag itself as being an upgraded install, and you could activate from that point.
I do remember playing similar shenanigans just a couple of years ago when I bought a laptop without Windows and I did not know that the Windows licence that came with my old laptop was bound to that machine...
I had a random Windows 8 key lying around and through a bit of wrestling (which I should have probably documented...) I was able to use that to install a new copy of Win10 on my laptop (which should be upgradable to Win11).
"Modern" today means "recently changed". Not better, not less bugs, just that it's recently changed. It can even have more bugs, but it still will be "modern", and people will be OK with that, because since it's recently changed, it has to have bugs, right?
Examples:
- "in some programs, double-clicking program icon on top-left window will close the program. it's a same actions as Win3.1 even Win1.0, where the close button is placed on top-left window until Win95." quote Rizki Fauzan (not counting this as a Windows 1.0 remnant because it was still useful in 3.1)
Why is it a problem? Why removing this feature is desirable? I often doubleclick the icon to close the window (because my Linux desktop has X in the top left corner instead of top right). Why it's desirable to not have this feature?
- pifmgr.dll and moricons.dll (ancient icon libraries) - left since Windows 3.1
Those icons are often superior to their "modern" counterparts, even though they’re not vector graphics. Why would anyone want to remove them?
- ODBC Data Sources - unchanged since Windows 3.1
I wonder if the author even knows what ODBC is?
Some of the entries are also wrong (msconfig has been updated since Win98).
This list in the center of why I am depressed by today's software design.
That's what modern always means. Sometimes modern is good, sometimes it's bad; this applies to art, technology, cuisine, lifestyles, etc. Although on windows 'Modern UI' was a keyword refering specifically to the Tiles UI and everything that went with it. I think Microsoft has tried to forget that. If the term sticks, 'Modern UI' will become the same sort of term as 'Art Nouveau' that means New Art in theory, but means art in a style that was defined around 1880-1910.
I have been stubbornly calling this "Metro" since it first came out. Sure, Microsoft may have deprecated the terminology 12 years ago, but I don't care, and neither does Wikipedia.
Some bits of the 20th century were about improvement.
The 21st has been about spiralling growth and consumption and everything getting worse than before, although sometimes it's briefly shiny.
In software, in hardware, in human life on the planet Earth.
Once you accept this, things make more sense and it's easier to relate to people born into this world and their jaded detachment.
20th century "modern" -- better, improved, refined.
21st century "modern" -- given a coat of paint, looks shiny, but underneath it's the same old junk, just worn out and creaking and failing, but rebranded and sold as NEW.
I don't get it. Why being so overly critical? Why should they update the ODBC.exe or dxdiag.exe, or even regedit.exe? They serve their purpose and work just fine.
WinPE has its roots in NT5.1 (XP), but it was from NT6.0 (Vista) that we got the "modern" installer, and it last saw a UI overhaul during NT6.1 (7). Throughout 8 through 11 so far, the first part of the installer was and is basically Windows 7.
The screenshot[1] of WinPE 10.0 on that Wikipedia article showcases the Windows Basic[2] theme in all its glory, including even the Windows 7 and prior Task Manager.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_PE_screenshot.png
PE was built using XP but the XP installer was mostly the NT installer (text mode then Mini-Windows).
Before Vista, the installer process on NT had three phases:
1. Optional DOS phase to bring minimal NTLDR environment up
2. "Micro" NT without Win32 API that ran only NTAPI (NE format executables et al) applications in the minimal console support (with the characteristic default of white on blue). This would do equivalent of "minimal install" on unices to the target disk, setting up proper HAL.DLL, boot time drivers, and setting up registry hives.
3. GUI installer that booted from hard disk with Win32 subsystem enabled.