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Comment by liquidise | Hacker News Reader

This triggered a rabbit hole search that had me rediscover Packard Bell Navigator[1]. The nostalgia and joy this page brings me is hard to describe. I hope everyone remembers their formative tech journey so fondly.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator

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I vaguely remember using that UI. It's in that strange category of preset graphical menu launchers that were a bit more than an autoexec shell menu but much less than an OS. File it under "ideas that seemed like they might be good in concept... but were too limited in practice."

I think I got it on an early Packard Bell Pentium system in 1994. I remember I used it even though it sucked because it seemed a little better than Windows 3.1 mostly due to the fact it didn't try to look like a functional windowing operating system. Once I got my hands on Win95 beta, I never ran it again. Of course, early Win95 also sucked as a real OS but it was enough better than Win 3.1 that I could slowly begin to transition off my beloved Amiga 2500.

I never experienced it but somehow I still feel nostalgic for it. For all we've gained there's so much we've lost as well, I'm sad my kids won't grow up with anything like this.

For all we've gained... the social media site I have the healthiest relationship with is basically just text and would run fine on a machine from 1998. Sure, some parts of modernity are nice (I don't miss having to call taxi companies) but I could do without a lot of it.

The maturity brought upon us homogenized experience. 90's user interfaces were something else, man.

> The maturity brought upon us homogenized experience.

This is "hunter gatherer experience": click an element, see if it does something (opens a link, displays a menu), see if it brings any value. Such a waste of human life.

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

The computing world, and not only it but also large parts of the real world, has abandoned creativity and turned into homogeneous corporatized slop.

Just look at what happened to McDonalds.

> Packard Bell Navigator is an alternative shell for the Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 operating systems

Huh. I thought the term "shell" generally referred to command line interfaces to the OS and that Unity's way of describing itself as a graphical shell was some "new" (2011) generalization of the term, but I guess there is at least this precedent for using the word like that.

> but I guess there is at least this precedent for using the word like that.

In Windows 3.1, the SYSTEM.INI had a setting called "shell" for overriding the default program started after Windows had loaded. Use of the word "shell" in this sense to describe a graphical interface dates back at least this far.

There was also a crude character-mode graphical interface called MS-DOS Shell, in 1988.

"shell" might be best generalised as "the first interactive program to run after boot" rather than "command line interface".

It's the shell around the core.

Yes, but because CLIs came before TUIs/GUIs, I thought it only caught with CLIs until Unity (2011) adopted it for GUIs. Turns out there's been some GUIs that have used the term since Windows 3.1 and a TUI in 1988.

And right after starting that awesome little glimpse of the future, because weren't we all headed for the Max Headroom / Lawnmower Man inspired VR someday? It sure seemed inevitable - You would start up another wonder of the CD-ROM era like Encarta and just wonder at how they could have fit SO MUCH information on one computer. How could you have ever wanted for more?

Lol

Past me's head would have exploded just to have seen modern Wikipedia and GitHub back then.

Oh, this made me dig up a memory: What was that skeuomorphic music player Packard Bell would bundle with Windows 3.1? It looked like a stack of stereo equipment with a CD player, MIDI player and wav player/recorder. When I was a kid I loved how it looked like a stereo system and grabbed a copy from a friend. I also remember being greatly disappointing when it would not run on Windows 95.

That was Voyetra Audiostation, and I definitely remember having it on the Packard Bell 486 that was my family's first computer (which was already obsolete when we got it, since we got the cheapest machine they had; it was on clearance sale). While I do have Windows 3.10 and 3.11 for Workgroups images, I don't (yet) have one with Audiostation. I have sometimes thought about trying to find the closest PB master CD ISO to the one that came with that machine and install it, but just haven't gotten around to doing that yet (still got lots of other stuff to install).

Oh this is that this was called. A long time ago, like in Googles earlier stages, I tried so hard to find this from my memory, but I failed and over the years forgot about it. Thanks for bringing it up again.

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