Winpopup (2001) | Hacker News Reader

Winpopup (2001)

susam.net

43 pointssusam33 comments

Kinda related old guy story time: My high school had a small room full of 286es running Novell, which was dated even for its time. I was a self-taught nerd who took intro-to-programming classes to goose my GPA easily (it didn't help, I dropped out anyway, but that's a whole other story). Anyway, I had been exposed to early IRC and BITNet Relay and decided I could clone it easily by just appending a chat log to an ever-growing file on the Novell network, and the 'clients' would just periodically check this file for growth and print the new bytes. Once one important bug was fixed (you couldn't check the file too often or you'd melt the Novell server), the chat program was permanently installed as a plague upon the high-school programming classes. Novell had its own popup messaging in text mode, but they'd already locked it down due to student shenanigans, but this was a group chat that could be made to work wherever there was a world-readable Novell share, and iirc the network wouldn't function properly without at least one (the 'mail' directories? idk it's been awhile).

Gosh I was so proud. I never directly caused any computer problems in high school, but damn if they didn't try to find a way to blame me for every foul wind that blew. They deserved my little group-chat annoyance.

Ahh, the memories. Abusing "net send" in WinNT 4.0 in my first workplace was our daily pastime (all other chat apps were forbidden).

A friend at high school was suspended after discovering the whole district shared a network and spammed our rival school with messages.

It was only a matter of time, with opportunities like that - what did they expect?

Adults underestimate the trouble a kid will cause from boredom and curiosity and self-centredness. It’s a self-serving underestimate (the less trouble we anticipate, the less we need to do now). Pay in school IT isn’t great and frequently there’s a hobbyist going “I can make this [glorious thing] possible” and not thinking ahead to “and I also make this [annoying/ destructive/ unlawful/ inconvenient thing] possible”.

Extension to the wider software industry left as exercise to the reader.

I did that in 8th grade across 3 schools that shared a network. Got my laptop privileges revoked for a few months.

It was just a batch script where I had copy/pasted the same line over and over again, no fancy loops.

I was pretty sure I was about to get in trouble when I messaged "wake up" to a kid that fell asleep at his computer and he called the teacher over. The computers were named numerically and in the same order they were laid out in the room, so they could have looked at the printed label on his machine, and the name of the machine the message came from, and counted over to me just as easily as I counted over to him, but they just puzzled over it for a second and dropped it.

Just looking at these screenshots makes me wish computers were still so (relatively) simple. I’m no Windows fan, but it’s so soothingly retro.

Don't get too sentimental. Windows 98 didn't really have any real memory protection. Meaning every process could modify all kinds of memory they shouldn't (kernel, other proceses, etc.). Hence kernel panics (aka "blue screens") were quite common. They usually happend multiple times a week. Auto-save also wasn't really a thing. I still have a "CTRL - S" reflex whenever I have some form of editor open.

But… skeuomorphism and crispy lines of pixels! And cute sound effects.

You could use it with only a local account though.

Oh no! What will I do without my cloud account, telemetry, and ads?

General purpose computing, you miscreant!

I think they're right about the interface itself, and agree with you wholeheartedly about the technical problems of the time. NT was a massive leap forward and it amazes me how long it existed before Microsoft could merge the consumer and business spaces in XP.

That said, something to be said for truly feeling in control of your own computer and not worrying at all about what it's doing behind your back (or what might change without you knowing in the next update!)

And after 30 years Windows 10 and 11 has only limited file protection so any ransomware can be fatal. I guess we are evolving.

They were referring to the simplicity of the GUI. Not the OS architecture.

Windows NT 4 had memory protection and this GUI, if that helps frame it in your mind.

I really miss the UI/UX of the 90s and I sincerely think that while nostalgia plays a part, they have real merit. We don't really think about what we've lost in the quest for "attractive" and "simple" UIs

In those screenshots, what's clickable is obvious. What things can be interacted with is hinted at. Every element has a generous amount of space to be selected/clicked.

I really do believe that modern UIs generally increase cognitive load and are less enjoyable to use. Things are less discoverable than they used to be.

It amazes me how much early interfaces got right, and saddens me how much we've forgotten.

Modern UIs are also almost impossible for elderly people to use, precisely because the common sense notions of ‘button’ and ‘scrollbar’ and such are frowned upon and have been all but banished. Ironically, iOS is full of obscure hidden controls and options despite the Macintosh being one of the greatest examples of intuitive UI design ever — which might actually be even harder to appreciate in hindsight given that it set the standard in so many ways.

I am sure you like the SerenityOS interface

Are there some shenanigans here with the publication date?

The screenshots looked surprisingly large and high-quality for something published in 2001. I looked up the page in the Internet Archive, and there's no record of its publication before today:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://susam.ne...

The screenshots are 640x480. That's most likely simply a full screen screenshot. The whole style of the write-up looks much more modern than 2001 though. I assume it was first published on a different URL and with a different style (or at least it would very much surprise that someone would write about Winpopup nowadays).

That's true, I guess it's more the quality.

Were people publishing lossless PNG screenshots in 2001? My memory of screenshots of that time was that they were super compressed GIFs and JPEGs.

Right, good question. I can't remember where in time the transition was from small heavily compressed to high quality full size images in relation to 2001, nor when exactly the transition to PNG was. But now that I think about, 2001 seems early indeed.

I agree: something is weird.

Hello! The article is indeed from 2001 from a different site of mine. The post was imported into my current blog a couple of years ago when I was consolidating my different websites into one. The screenshots were added at the same time. I thought it might be a good idea to illustrate what the software looked like by taking screenshots of Windows 98 in an emulator.

To avoid any confusion, I'll add an update date to the article, clarifying that the screenshots were not obtained in 2001. Thanks for calling this out!

I even got a call from a person who received one of the popups over the internet. Because the message had my name on it. I just happened to have a common name in Finland, and the receiver dug up my phone number and called. Of course, it was not me who sent the popup, but it was pretty amusing to explain that indeed it was not me, and I gave instructions on how to disable the 'feature' completely.

Unix Talk [1] in terminal only class in university, because telnet talkers were already too much..

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

In other words, "net send".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Messenger_service

Gotta love "net send".

I just recently watched an old episode of The Screensavers from 2002 where Kevin Rose talked about potential spam abuse of computers connected to the internet with the service enabled.

If you got some nostalgia from this Winpopup post, it's definitely worth watching! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNUhIy78Ro

Ah the memories. I wrote my own net send receiver (eg. a winpopup without the sending capabilities) back in the days: https://www.splitbrain.org/projects/popupmessage

IIRC it was used briefly in the hospital I worked at as a way to send messages to specific workstations.

In the early days of ADSL in the Netherlands all PC's got a public IP when they connected. Winpopup was a lot of fun those days...

ahhh, IT lessons at school. That was our local chat tool.

s/chat/cheat in my school.

Holy crap, workgroups. I remember those. Opening up other kids' shared folders in college and finding pirated software, someone's collection of MTM files they composed... porn...

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