Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I got to boot a Pentium III desktop (Dell Dimension XPS 1450) few monthes ago. I missed nothing about today's UX. It was no brainer yet not restricting for 90% of your needs. Extremely light and fast (the whole OS runs in less memory than an average webpage). I almost tried to build emacs and a scheme and live in heaven forever.

There was a classical canonical sweet spot in this era design mindset. Kinda like going into a country side cabin. No fancy stuffy, yet most things are just like they need to.

ps: It's hard to remove nostalgia / habit bias; but I consider myself far from prejudiced, having gone into almost all UX fads since I had a keyboard and a mouse. I accept qualities in all systems be it Apple, Linux, Amiga, SGI, HP handeld calcs and all kinds of different ergonomics (CAD, Compositing, Video, Audio, code, shell, IDEs, Smalltalk) ... And even after seeing all of this, Old Windows (until 2K) had a nice sweet spot feel.

I definitely agree with you! The first computer I could call my own was a hand-me-down eMachines eTower 733i Mini-tower desktop with a 733MHz Celeron, upgraded to 256MB of RAM, and a 20GB HDD I was gifted around 2004. I installed a copy of Windows 2000 on it and used it daily for another 2-3 years. I miss the minimal, no-frills UI that caused little-to-no performance hiccups. And I definately feel similar about the Classic MacOS "Platinum" interface (Mac OS 8 thru 9). Despite both sharing what many percieve as a "boring" gray color scheme, the 3D look of the buttons and UI elements made things easy to see and understand their function. I currently work at a company where I find myself often using monitors connected to KVM switches, often with improperly adjusted contrast and brightness. Modern flat web application GUIs in this setting are barely usable, forcing the user to struggle to determine where a button or text area's boundaries are. Though I have to hope this environment is not the norm for 90% of users, I wish modern interface design encouraged such "GUI robustness" and functional minimalism whereby the UI remains functional despite the display's configuration. A similar poor-contrast situation could arise when viewing a display from an improper angle or in a very bright environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com