Comment by vessenes
1 day ago
Amazing walk through memory lane, and super useful. One big omission though - starting in the early 1990s, we should be seeing some Linux desktops in there, but I didn’t see any through 1995 or so when I stopped browsing. Also, Irix would be nice to get — although I don’t recall if SGI had much in the way of custom vibes for their window managers, they certainly had amazingly cool 3D demos.
A nice vibe coding project here would be to show these in a carousel with the UI being 1:1 pixels. It’s hard to understand just how different NeXTStep (Did I capitalize that correctly?) felt from Windows — part of it was refresh rates, but part of it was going from 800x600 to 1132x800-ish on the monitor. Color, refresh rates, monitor quality, a cool plastic color and design for the box were all part of the experience.
> It’s hard to understand just how different NeXTStep (Did I capitalize that correctly?) felt from Windows — part of it was refresh rates, but part of it was going from 800x600 to 1132x800-ish on the monitor.
You can't really get it from these screenshots, but I'll give an example of what you're talking about.
I remember GEM when it came out, and it simply looked terrible. Not just their color choice, but simply that low resolution display there were stuck with in the day. It looked cheap, and like a toy. Specifically in contrast to the Mac, which, while it was a smaller monitor, and even lower pixel count, the overall display was crisper, and cleaner, brighter, better contrast.
The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy.
Also, don't forget that the NeXT computers were striving for being "3M" computers. "3M" for 1M pixels, 1 MIPS, and "1 Megapenny" ($10,000). Definitely a different class of machines to OTS PCs of the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer
> The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy.
The Amiga was designed to look good on the crappiest TV around. It was a home computer, not a professional workstation. But if you had a nice monitor, high-res B&W screen modes were easily available.
Indeed, is this a comparison of home computers running on a cheap TV, with business computers running on an expensive monitor?
I remember being amazed at how sharp the Amiga Workbench looked when I upgraded from an old TV to a "real" monitor. On the flip side, I was disappointed with how the ground in Cannon Fodder was now a collection of individual crisp pixels, instead of all blurring together as before. That gave me a very clear illustration of how it was "designed to look good on the crappiest TV".
Amiga OS 2.0 was a huge improvement in that regard! It had more of a 3D look.
RE: GEM, the Atari SM124 monochrome monitor was actually a super high quality monitor that was known at the time for producing a crisp comfortable image, and it was higher resolution (640x400) than the Mac (512x342).
GEM on it actually looked really good. The problem was two fold: with the Atari you had the choice of one or the other (colour or mono), the colour was very low resolution, GEM looked squished and crappy and cheap in low (360x200) & med-res (640x200) on colour .. and on the application development side there just wasn't the same caliber and quantitiy of developers to build good looking GEM applications.
But I mean if you look at some of the better more sophisticated applications like Cubase or Calamus or the original version of Logic, they were pretty nicely designed.
The base window decorations were a bit chunky compared to the Mac .. but not awful, and also easily changed. There were accessories that re-themed things via changing the font.
GEM over top of DOS on the PC? Yeah, awful.
The Ventura Publisher branch of GEM looked decent though
I don't know what happened to GEM. As someone who used them all GEM was superior to both Windows 1 and Windows 2. Macintosh had them all beat although it was a slower machine. But GEM didn't seem to advance and when Windows 3 came out they were toast.
For me Windows 3 (and especially 3.1) was the first time where you could work all day without having to drop to the DOS prompt to get work done. I was running Windows 3.1 when I first used the Mosaic browser on the then new world wide web and my life was never the same again.
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> Also, Irix would be nice to get — although I don’t recall if SGI had much in the way of custom vibes for their window managers, they certainly had amazingly cool 3D demos.
IRIX used the 4Dwm window manager, which is a lot more polished than other UNIX desktops. Few screens I found: https://deskto.ps/u/fathonix/d/3p6fkk https://files.catbox.moe/cognfj.jpg https://guidebookgallery.org/guis/irix/screenshots
> https://files.catbox.moe/cognfj.jpg
That screenshot shows songs from the band "Bran Van 3000" playing and "Drinking in L.A." is in the list, now that is trip down memory lane! (late 90s)
Thank you so much for that, haven't listened to that in a very long time.
Notably, NeXT scrollbars were also on the left edge of the window, the logic being that (at least for left-to-right languages) most people focus on the left side of the document more often. I remember liking it.
I wonder why Apple swapped back to the right-hand scrollbars with OS X. I guess just because that's what classic MacOS and nearly everyone else did.
My thoughts:
1. There were far more users of the classic Mac OS than there were users of NeXTstep/OPENSTEP. Mac OS X has many of OPENSTEP’s underpinnings, but it wasn’t OPENSTEP 5.0; it was Mac OS X, a continuation of the Mac but with new underpinnings. The interface was different enough to represent a new direction for the Mac but without turning the Mac UI/UX into that of NeXT.
2. At the time NeXTstep was under development (mid-late 1980s), the case law surrounding UI look-and-feel and how much borrowing and inspiration one could have before it became infringing wasn’t settled. Apple had lawsuits with Digital Research and Microsoft over whether GEM and Windows infringed on the Macintosh’s look-and-feel. Recall that NeXT was formed after Steve Jobs’ failed coup at Apple against then-CEO John Sculley. Apple sued NeXT due to Jobs’ poaching of key Apple employees who worked with him on the Macintosh and allegations that NeXT was going to use Apple’s intellectual property (in some ways NeXT could be thought of as the evolution of the “Big Mac” project Steve Jobs worked on before his departure). They ended up settling out of court, but given Apple’s litigious nature and given the history of how NeXT came to be, it was very wise for NeXTstep to feature a UI/UX that was a radical departure from the Macintosh. While I don’t think a lawsuit about right-hand scroll bars would succeed, having them on the left helps defend against allegations that NeXTstep ripped off the Mac.
I wonder if it's righthanded mouse users? I'm using a vertical ergo mouse beneath my monitor, and your comment made me realize that it's quite similar to if I just.. reached for the scrollbar and pulled it. As opposed to having to cross the whole screen, metaphorically.
There's also the distraction factor. Maybe having the bar moving on the left edge competes with moving from line to line, and the general anchoring edge of the F shaped reading pattern.
Total speculation on my part.
There's a Slackware screenshot from 1994:
http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/linux-0.99p15-fvwm-m...
There is an SGI IRIX screenshot there from late 90’s. I scanned the list to take a look specifically for it.
I once saw 4 of the SGI Onyx2 RealityMonster supercomputers in a post-production house’s render farm in London.
They were so expensive, ($1m+ per computer) that it was only financially viable if they were engaged on client work 24/7/365. Damn gorgeous things and they turned the display of those into almost an art piece for wow-ing film studio execs.
Fun times.
I may have some KDE 2 and 3 screenshots to add.
Nice. A Redhat Mother’s Day set would be amazing. I didn’t screenshot much in that era, and had a catastrophic data loss in 1998 or so that was a real bummer; Usenet, emails, IRC logs. Even then it hurt, but today, ouch.