Latter NeXTStep feels like the peak of computing UI aesthetic. Maybe the abstractions and metaphors have improved a bit (I do think modern drag-and-drop icon-based file managers are probably an improvement), but everything interactable and non-interactable in those interfaces is crystal clear and unambiguous. Some of the themes I've seen around the Internet are spot-on perfect.
Why did Linux so thoroughly abandon that look? Almost everything that works on Linux theme sites is...flat. FLAT. It's ALL FLAT.
I still use WindowMaker as my primary desktop GUI for Linux/BSD systems. It still holds up and is light on resources. The fact it really isn't updated anymore is a feature in itself.
It doesn't work with Wayland afaik, but I wouldn't consider that a bad thing.
>I do think modern drag-and-drop icon-based file managers are probably an improvement
I largely agree, though using drag and drop with touchpads (or touchscreens) is a bit of a chore, as is with large or multi-monitor setups. Sometimes you have to pre-arrange your windows before you drag and drop or you run the risk of dragging and dropping in the wrong place.
It was so much easier when all you had was 512x342 to work in.
> though using drag and drop with touchpads (or touchscreens) is a bit of a chore
Having been playing a lot of the new Zelda game, I'm now convinced that I should be able to drag-and-drop files by wiggling the mouse randomly around an object until it gets picked up, and then not having to hold anything until I click again to put it down.
> Sometimes you have to pre-arrange your windows before you drag and drop or you run the risk of dragging and dropping in the wrong place.
Stupid pro-tip that nobody should need but here it is anyway: on macOS, you can three-finger-swipe-up with your index+middle+ring finger while "holding" the drag with your thumb, to get into Mission Control; then hover over the correct window for a while, which will close Mission Control and bring that window into focus; and then drop.
Sorry to be that guy again, but can I have my "Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0" back please? (When the world was still simple and the future was yet in the future).
Some time ago a fellow NH user has proposed an interesting idea to build an ML UI transformer, which will sit on top of the broken MS Windows 2030 OS and transform the UI experience in real-time to the UI of my choice.
You can also use b00merang GTK+ themes to get the same look in GTK+3 and GTK+4 apps. The end result is extremely usable, even the new responsive and mobile-friendly interfaces in GTK+4 apps work just fine. (Unfortunately GTK+4 has lost out-of-the-box support for themes, so you must change GTK-global configuration instead.)
Good to see Arthur and RISCOS there, running on ARM. Back in the day, it was silly how much more performant it was than everything else available (especially PCs [1]). It's just a shame there was no market penetration in the US where the biggest sales would have been.
I dunno, windows 3.1 was and still is a bizarre mess of different UI ideas. It's like half original mac desktop, half norton commander and none of it makes sense. You even have the completely wacky MDI paradigm for many apps where you effectively put a window manager inside your window manager. It all really made no sense and there's a very good reason windows 95 threw it all away to start over with start menu and the desktop paradigm we all use today.
As far as I can tell, Windows 3.1 was designed around a pretty-coherent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface metaphor... as implemented on computers not powerful enough to actually do zooming UI.
Think about it: windows "iconified" to the desktop, and the icons for many programs and document types were intended to look like (a stylized version of) what the program's main window would look like if shrunk down to that size. You had windows inside windows; and in programs like Program Manager, you could open up icons inside windows to get more windows inside your windows.
All they needed to do is to make the windows that open up inside windows, open up embedded within the window that previously contained their icon (i.e. recursive MDI, rather than sibling MDI), and it'd have been true ZUI.
Of course, that would have been an awful idea on hardware without the ability to render anti-aliased resampled images in real-time, nor any input device that could implement an analogue pinch-to-zoom gesture.
But what I'm saying is, you could design an OS around "what Windows 3.1 was trying to do" today, and it'd be pretty cool.
Ahh, my first workplace had a MicroVAX II and some SPARCstation 2s with a special place in my heart. We ran Ultrix/Motif and SunOS/OpenWindows, so these arcane screenies of MicroVMS, SunTools, and Display PostScript are educational for me.
The MicroVax was sort of the secondary, older system but it intrigued me, and I hacked on it, securing some career advancement along the way. I'd already saved our reputation and revenue bigtime by overhauling our authentication server. When word got around that I'd reconfigured the Ultrix kernel to my liking, I feared a reprimand but received a promotion to sysadmin and a 33% raise.
The SparcStation 2 was the jewel of the office and its printer was the bane of my existence. There was a storage pedestal and a SPARC Laser printer; this system was in a triple role as a desktop workstation, office print server, and customer/public Internet services of whatever sort existed before WWW.
Now the SPARC Printer used Display Postscript as its engine, and that's why I'm ranting about it here on this article. Display Postscript-based printers are like WinModems: they're essentially dumb devices, and IIUC, they appear somewhat like a monitor to the host system. So the Postscript engine runs on the host and then zaps rendered pages out to the device.
This is great in theory, and it's great in practice if you've got a dedicated print server and your printer never jams or fouls physically. Well guess what. We were heavy users on that thing, because everyone in the United States was phoning us asking how to get on the Internet, and we offered a free guide for that. So we printed a new copy and stuffed it in an envelope for every request!
When the printer hung, being dependent on the host system, its engine daemon hung in Device Wait on the server, and there was no way to unwedge it until we rebooted. So we'd all stop work, kick off the desktop user, reboot it, get the printer back, and try to pick up where we left off.
Upon promotion, I was provisioned with a SPARCstation LX, and I promptly eschewed OpenWindows in favor of twm.I ran rc, mh, Emacs, and sometimes I would fire up NCSA Mosaic, because these weirdos on the Internet were starting to "blog" about what they ate for lunch.
Slightly off-topic, but a little while back someone shared an article with a screenshot of a lot of famous developers desktops including Kernighan, Ritchie, Pike, Rasmus Lerdorf and a load of others (they are just the ones that come to mind). One of things I remember was the use of Windows for some historical Unix person and also one of them liking non-monospaced fonts. Can anyone find this link? Thanks in advance!
That's very cool! I just wish whoever captured those screenshots hadn't "posed" the computer for these screenshots. I am more curious how people would actually use them, not what these interfaces look like when you purposely try to show of their capabilities.
Most are probably still easier/saner to use & program with than the goddam DOM/HTML/CSS rendering via bloated JS libraries.
We sorely need a state-ful GUI markup standard so we can get desktop-friendly GUI's over HTTP instead of rely on binary, proprietary, and/or DOM-JS-bloat tools.
I kept hoping the web would eventually grow decent GUI standards, but it never did. Social networks and dancing-cat videos got all the attention, not real-work-GUIs. DOM is inherently the wrong tool for the job, and fixing it would break backward compatibility.
Ladies and gents, the source of my contempt for most modern Linux GUI "development."
The "desktop" is mostly a solved problem, because it's just the thing you encounter BEFORE you get to your applications; flippin' openbox with a few minor addtional tweaks is fine for 99% of people.
Man, System 7.5 and the OS X Developer Preview 2 are so damn crisp. I know you can approximate that look on Linux, but it's never quite the real thing. I would do horrible things if I could have a modern desktop that truly looked like those.
Some good memories for me hp, VMS, OS/2, spent a lot of time on those. Also good to see Geoworks in there, I seem to remember getting a $10 "working model" to play with back in the day.
The real question is how many of these did you use or have exposure to during the time... I lost count after a while, but I also switched platforms all the time back in my youth ;)
very odd that they are missing the first Mac there; secondly, those screenshots only hint at what it was like to use those.. half of those are almost useless without a two hour training class first. The combination of UI elements and sequence of operations, into the software itself.. not to be taken for granted in those days. It is also striking to reflect on the number of engineering hours in all of those, and how most of that is literally lost in today's mono-cultures.
celebrating 40 years of WIMP — what were your dreams in the 1980s, of UIs now?
(as if I'm one to talk: almost all my billable work occurs in terminal windows, much of it on the command line, which —pace cursor addressing— goes back to the 1960s)
Why did Linux so thoroughly abandon that look? Almost everything that works on Linux theme sites is...flat. FLAT. It's ALL FLAT.