Hacker News Reader

Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

This was long before proper scaling fonts and pretty much all the windowing systems across Unices, OS/2 and other niche windowing systems for the PC all looked like this.

Back then it looked like the future compared to a green screen or a DOS application

View on HN

I agree to Steve Jobs non technical comment on this. They have no taste. Look to Macintosh interface where they just had 2 colours and comically lower resolution. OS/2 IBM ones look like a mainframe having a concept desktop. They don't have too much taste either. The low specs of the time isn't an excuse to ship ugly icons and fonts.

The resolution was actually higher on Mac. CGA (in its "high-resolution" monochrome mode) was only 640x200!

Hey, at least Win 2.x allowed overlapping windows. Recall that Win 1.0x only permitted tiled windows.

The PC graphics ecosystem was crap at the time (VGA was introduced around the time of Win 2.x shipping).

from the OldNewThing blog, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100625-00/?p=13... :

    the Color Graphics Adapter, better known by the abbreviation CGA...
    ...320×200 color mode ...or 1:2.4 in 640×200 monochrome mode. Windows used the monochrome mode because the colors available in color mode were pretty useless. You could have black, white, hot pink, and aqua; or you could have black, brown, orange-red and green (no white!). 

    ...next major advancement in display adapter technology was the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), which brought you a stunning 16 colors in a 640×350 grid with an aspect ratio of 1.83:1. But for the step forward in terms of color, you also took a step backwards into the insanity of planar video modes. EGA memory was arranged in planes, and what’s worse, each plane had the same memory address! You had to use other registers to program the video card to tell it which plane you wanted to talk to when you accessed a specific memory address.

For many of the Mac developers, like Bill Atkinson, Mac OS was their second version of GUI OS, after working on the Lisa.

And the Intel 8088's segmented memory architecture is more mental work than the flat address space of the Motorola 68K (all those data and address registers on the 68K are nice too).

The pre-Win 3.0 fonts were ugly. That's why I ignored Windows and developed for the Mac.

I suspect that Windows used monochrome mode to squeeze 78 characters per line, not because the colours were "useless".

CGA graphics is tricky, but it can look at least as pretty as contemporary ZX Spectrum: https://media.tech.lgbt/media_attachments/files/112/481/028/...

Not very many people cared for CGA, though.

Another thing to keep in mind is that they’d be displayed on a CRT monitor, which makes the image much more forgivable in person.

As long as you'd never seen a Macintosh or Amiga

Macintosh were still black and white at the time, and really expensive, more so than PCs, a tradition that never changed.

Amiga yes, but it got the fame of only being good for people doing games, thus it had a hard time getting adoption on business offices.

Windows 2 came out in December 1987. The Macintosh II (which introduced "full" palettized 8-bit color) had already come out in March 1987.

And you could buy a decent car for the price of the Mac II. Base model was twice the cost of a well specced PC/AT at the time.

In terms of price it was in the same league as Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations, not the PC.

While I stand corrected on the year being the same, there is the question of the price, which offered a 16 bit VGA, not 8 bit colour palette as you mentioned, at more affordable price point.

16-color VGA, not 16 bits (which would be 65536 colors).

Amiga Workbench had a comically bad interface, though?

I don't see why it would be called "comically bad" compared to its contemporaries. The 1.x series was a bit spartan, sure. But the UI itself afforded several unique features that weren't found anywhere else. The ability to have multiple "screens" or viewports with independent resolutions and color depths and drag them down to navigate between them seamlessly was quite useful, as was the ability to move windows on top/bottom of the stack without focusing the window (which is largely a forgotten paradigm, outside of forced "always on top" windows which is just a bandage over the lack of decoupled focus and window depth). AmigaOS certainly got better for the most part with the 2.x and 3.x series. Commodore's mismanagement is largely what did the Amiga in, not any technical aspects.

I was talking about the looks of the version 1. Technical side of things seems quite solid, and things have clearly improved by 2.x.

I only became an Amiga owner in the 21st century, when it was all over bar the shouting, but friends owned them at the time and loved them. (I had an Acorn Archimedes with RISC OS 2.)

As I understand it, the weird colours of AmigaDOS 1.x (blue, white, black and orange) were chosen to deliver usable contrast on an analogue TV set. This not only means a blurry CRT, but also that, given where the Amiga was designed and made, it was an NTSC TV.

http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html

I've never watched NTSC TV in my life but I remember the 1980s joke definition: "Never Twice the Same Colour".

They have a good excuse for it. They designed everything to look readable/usable on average home TV. Add the loss of quality in RF modulator and you figure the crazy colour scheme with ultra simple icons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com