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Comment by FergusArgyll | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of nostalgia in the comments here. I wonder if any reader under say 25 is willing to comment; do you think OS's today are a regression? do those look better?

To me they look unwieldy, heavy and overwhelming and I can't help but think the love for them is just the love for youth or whatever

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There is definitely an element of nostalgia. However, a lot of earlier desktop OS GUIs do seem to be more internally consistent and with more emphasis on usability than the current crop. I think part of the issue is that things that might make sense on a phone have bled into desktop OSes, where they make a lot less sense.

I don't mean this in a dismissive way but based on your profile I'd say you're > 25. I'm curious about the perspective of someone who didn't grow up with the those os's

25 is a very distant memory. ;0)

You’ll need an under-25 who’s both used some of these enough to really understand them, and has watched others of mixed expertise levels use them, to get a meaningful opinion. Screenshots don’t cut it, for the same reason as why modern UIs can look slick in screenshots or a demo then be frustrating in actual use.

That person’s gonna be very rare, while lots of over-25s have that experience.

I’m > 25, but I didn’t use those OS. I started with Windows XP, then did a bit of playing around with Gnome 2 on Linux Mint. You wouldn’t call them pretty, But you never had to guess about an icon or if an interaction was possible. It was pure get things done (barring crashes and slow hdds).

Today’s OS are aesthetically pleasing, especially with the right combination of windows, but using them is a frustrating experience.

>Today’s OS are aesthetically pleasing

I don't know about. All the different apps and OS windows are so inconsistent with each other. There is not much sense of an overall aesthetic. Just a mishmash of vaguely similar styles.

You have to appreciate that the nostalgia is not necessarily how these looked, but also how they worked.

Also, there's simply the reminiscing back to the era when these were out. When they were NEW, and revolutionary.

All things that cannot be conveyed from a static screenshot.

Consider NeXTStep. Something you cannot see from these images are that when you moved a window on NS, the entire window moved. Not a frame, the entire thing. This was not normal in the day. Or that NS used Display PostScript. "Not only are they moving the entire window, they're using DPS to do it!" PostScript was powerful, and expensive, and for printers. Yet, here it was.

Or how fast BeOS was, and its cool filesystem, and other aspects.

It's certainly an interesting question to ask folks that have opinions simply on the cosmetics of the various images that we see here, but appreciate that for the folks that "were there", at least for me, I'm not just remembering what it looked like, it's much more than that.

I will never forget when the Mac first came out, my friend and I went to see one at a computer store. And my friend just sat there, mouth agape, moving the mouse back and forth across the menubar, seeing them popup and popdown as it moved, and just going "Woooowwww".

I remember the shock of using a Mac SE after using DOS on a PC. Despite the tiny screen on the SE, it was an absolute revelation.

> when you moved a window on NS, the entire window moved.

That was a factor of available memory bandwidth to the framebuffer. Single-frame updates are something that only became definitely possible around the late 1990s to early 2000s, and that depending on what resolution and color depth you were running. High quality display settings would initially be quite slow to update. In many old PC games, full-screen displays would visibly update with a smooth windowblinds effect. You couldn't do any better than that, because screen updates were dog slow.

What's funny is there was third-party software that would enable it on the Mac, Apple could have done it far earlier than MacOS X.

1993 PowerBook 145B (25 MHz 68030) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cQo29SIIgU

1994 PowerBook 540c (33 MHz 68040) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peWIysrf7DY this one is a bit chunkier in the video recording than real life since enabling the external video visibly slows the graphics down

Basing one's opinion on how a static screenshot looks, is the reason we've moved towards pretty looks and away from usability concerns.

As other commentors have said, the overriding concern with these older OSs was to make them as easy as possible to use. It would never have crossed these developers' minds to, for example, hide the scrollbar because they think it looks ugly.

Looking at a screenshot doesn't really tell you anything if you're not familiar with it, but it's a nice reminder of using that software for those who are.

In most of the comments here, I'm not seeing "nostalgia" or "the love for youth". I'm seeing frustration with how the carefully researched and developed principles have been forgotten.

For some of these, you have to use them on the actual hardware to understand why so many of us are bummed about what we have lost. The latency of modern systems is kind of bonkers. Even though the machines were incredibly slow they feel faster than modern machines. Some musicians used Atari STs for years after they were discontinued because of the stable timing.

For others, the hardware wasn't important, but some of the functionality isn't apparent in a static screenshot. For example, I loved OS/2 and the Workplace Shell. It had functionality similar to Windows COM or CORBA in that everything on the system exposed an interface that could be easily scripted or used by other applications. The built-in scripting language was Rexx which I feel could have played the role Python does now if only OS/2 had taken off. Using OS/2 from 1.3 onwards felt like you were using a computer from the future.

I'm under 30 at least and I do feel nostalgia for these albeit not having used most of them. First OS I ever used must have been Windows 95. I wish we could all go back to Windows 7, that was the best OS ever imo.

Hi! I'm slightly under that so I feel like I'm qualified :)

I wholeheartedly agree, they're quite a regression.... although I don't think this is a popular opinion around here.

When people say "something used to be better" they usually don't mean literally, they mean that for the circumstances, it was better. Of course, more modern systems support more hardware, more features, etc., but if you made those same modern technical improvements on top of an older designs, you'd get much better results.

To me it looks like software design has been massively overtaken by "form over function", everyone just wants a unique "brand" but the actual UX is complete dogshit. Borderless buttons, zero indication what's clickable, no visual delimiters for different areas of programs, no good shortcut / altkey menu support, etc....

This has somehow infected even Linux to such a crazy extent...

I'm 23 and IMO, the Windows desktop style peaked somewhere in Windows 95-2000. The first Windows I ever used was XP, so I'm mostly making that decision based off screenshots and emulators.

UIs back then were dense, didn't waste large amounts of space in a misguided attempt to be "minimalist", and had affordances for ease of use. There was no scrollbar hiding, no animations that made the user wait for no reason other than the designer's ego, very visible borders on windows and buttons that made finding/resizing them easier, large bars at the top of windows that let you move them around, and actual text for most buttons instead of icons that are anyone's guess what they mean. Thankfully some of this can be dialed back in the Windows 11 accessibility settings, at least for missing scrollbars and getting rid of time wasting animations, but a lot of programs don't respect those.

That's right there is a good indicator for which programs care about their users. I'm using your program because I want to actually do something, not waste time watching your designers show off.

I've disabled animations on my Android phone too, and it gives an extremely noticable speedup. Menus appear right when I click them, instead of a second later as they slide into existence. Too bad iPhones just replace the slide with a fade of equal duration; disrespect for the user's time like that is yet another reason I will never buy one.

Those older GUIs didn't try to hide the filesystem hierarchy either. It infuriates me to no end when I use a new OS and have to hunt down the way to show the disk root, or filename extensions, or hidden files. MacOS was especially bad; I had to look up a freaking keyboard shortcut that I never would have found on my own. The common reason is so "normal people" can use the interfaces, but I think that's infantilizing and is why tons of Gen Z don't know what files or folders are. Most people can learn .docx means a Word document, and C:\Users\TheirName is where their files are.

(Notable shoutout, the GNOME open/save dialogs are the absolute worst. I wish distros wouldn't default to it. People will just go right back to Windows 11 because it's somehow better.)

There's some improvements possible, for sure. I'd like to see some programs put hint letters over buttons when you press a modifier like Ctrl so you can easily see what the shortcuts are. I don't know of any that do, but it'd be very useful for more complex software like drawing programs or word processors.

edit: typo

> Notable shoutout, the GNOME open/save dialogs are the absolute worst. I wish distros wouldn't default to it.

I'll never understand who in their right mind would think that in a save dialog, if I start typing, I mean to search for something instead of trying to change the name of the file. It's really baffling.

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