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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> keep hearing the Windows 3.1 story repeated

It’s wrong [1] and serves as a litmus test for whether an outlet independently verifies its claims.

(“The systems [Southwest] developed internally, SkySolver and Crew Web Access, look ‘historic like they were designed on Windows 95’.” That got mangled into they run 3.1.)

[1] https://www.osnews.com/story/140301/no-southwest-airlines-is...

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Wow, that’s even more frustrating considering it’s conflating an unfashionable UI (which I’d argue is a good thing, since all modern UI trends are towards slick, minimalism-worshiping messes which hide everything from users) and old, provably-flawed technological foundations (like a 16-bit system without things like filesystem access control or memory protection).

I knew this story was false immediately though because no company ever even in 1993 had production server systems which ran a desktop OS like Win 3.1. It just wasn’t up to the task. They would have used NT if anything.

http://www3.alpa.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=IO7kd%2Bfm2Do... shows the system as of 2020. To the parent’s point, it’s actually quite a reasonable UX, with colored outputs, filter banks, and just enough abbreviations and whitespace to balance density with intuitiveness.

But that doesn’t mean this is the only modern design system that meets those requirements. And conflating all modern UI with consumer design trends is an equally frustratingly broad statement.

OK, this is definitely unfashionable looking if your main exposure to apps is the latest doodah on your phone that was literally updated yesterday.

Very standard looking legacy Win32 looking app. Which, admittedly, would have probably look very similar had it been on Windows 3, but is probably running on LTSC Windows 10 or something in reality.

Doesn't look Microsoft at all to me, just colored to mimic XP. Java on some Unix?

Page 7 (as labeled) of the slides. The tabs and checkboxes layout have a distinctly Win 9x era look/feel. I do agree that it's missing an obvious menu, and the theme for the window decorations reminds me of win 3.1, but that was probably an option for software of that era just as it is in this if someone pushes hard enough.

Perhaps you just aren't old enough? It looks very Windows 95 to me.

Age has nothing to do with it, the interface just doesn't look like Windows 95.

The button shapes, minimize/close window buttons, the titlebar are all looking wrong for Windows 95.

It looks significantly more like Swing, but then the buttons don't match that either.

It looks like every single hospital or car rental software I have managed to peek.

It's not old-fashioned, it is _timeless_ B)

Link worked for me but took a long time to load. It just seems like their server is overloaded.

Broken link

Windows 95 is an "unfashionable" OS which has not received any security updates since 2001.

Yes and the fact that my software’s UI looks like Windows 95 makes it vulnerable to all the same security vulnerabilities.

The systems don’t run on W95, they look like W95

Being blasted by media for running your own software, incredible. As others have commented, just a single tweet was enough to propagate this story. Quite concerning how easy it is to fake reality nowadays.

This is the same as the "Olympic cardboard beds are anti-sex" fake story that persisted. Anyone who publishes it demonstrates they don't actually research.

Thanks, I updated the post.

i miss the lemonodor blog

I know this is a hot take but companies have to figure out if modernization of a UI will be worth it to retrain everyone in the new UI. Many people were involved with its creation and maintenance and due to its age the UI may have a large amount of glue code that can't be separated unless you build an API around the other software. Especially if there is some kind of change in the system that moving off the old one is meaningless. Southwest is also making changes to their operations so they probably might be in maintenance mode for the software especially when the outage of their current software was done since they will have to not have anyone choose any seat at this time. [1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/investing/southwest-airlines-...

I don't know, I like the classic Windows UI. I don't think modern UIs are an improvement on that.

No no no. We must now have floating headers that don't give any indication they belong to the columns below them, much less that you can click them to sort the columns. 95% of possible actions must only appear when hovered over. Buttons should not look like buttons, nor should they provide any feedback that they've actually been clicked. Etc.

to be fair, some of the java-era software with their default toolkits do look very windows 3.1/95'ish (all that blue and teal)

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