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Comment by hermitcrab | Hacker News Reader

There is definitely an element of nostalgia. However, a lot of earlier desktop OS GUIs do seem to be more internally consistent and with more emphasis on usability than the current crop. I think part of the issue is that things that might make sense on a phone have bled into desktop OSes, where they make a lot less sense.

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I don't mean this in a dismissive way but based on your profile I'd say you're > 25. I'm curious about the perspective of someone who didn't grow up with the those os's

25 is a very distant memory. ;0)

You’ll need an under-25 who’s both used some of these enough to really understand them, and has watched others of mixed expertise levels use them, to get a meaningful opinion. Screenshots don’t cut it, for the same reason as why modern UIs can look slick in screenshots or a demo then be frustrating in actual use.

That person’s gonna be very rare, while lots of over-25s have that experience.

I’m > 25, but I didn’t use those OS. I started with Windows XP, then did a bit of playing around with Gnome 2 on Linux Mint. You wouldn’t call them pretty, But you never had to guess about an icon or if an interaction was possible. It was pure get things done (barring crashes and slow hdds).

Today’s OS are aesthetically pleasing, especially with the right combination of windows, but using them is a frustrating experience.

>Today’s OS are aesthetically pleasing

I don't know about. All the different apps and OS windows are so inconsistent with each other. There is not much sense of an overall aesthetic. Just a mishmash of vaguely similar styles.

You have to appreciate that the nostalgia is not necessarily how these looked, but also how they worked.

Also, there's simply the reminiscing back to the era when these were out. When they were NEW, and revolutionary.

All things that cannot be conveyed from a static screenshot.

Consider NeXTStep. Something you cannot see from these images are that when you moved a window on NS, the entire window moved. Not a frame, the entire thing. This was not normal in the day. Or that NS used Display PostScript. "Not only are they moving the entire window, they're using DPS to do it!" PostScript was powerful, and expensive, and for printers. Yet, here it was.

Or how fast BeOS was, and its cool filesystem, and other aspects.

It's certainly an interesting question to ask folks that have opinions simply on the cosmetics of the various images that we see here, but appreciate that for the folks that "were there", at least for me, I'm not just remembering what it looked like, it's much more than that.

I will never forget when the Mac first came out, my friend and I went to see one at a computer store. And my friend just sat there, mouth agape, moving the mouse back and forth across the menubar, seeing them popup and popdown as it moved, and just going "Woooowwww".

I remember the shock of using a Mac SE after using DOS on a PC. Despite the tiny screen on the SE, it was an absolute revelation.

> when you moved a window on NS, the entire window moved.

That was a factor of available memory bandwidth to the framebuffer. Single-frame updates are something that only became definitely possible around the late 1990s to early 2000s, and that depending on what resolution and color depth you were running. High quality display settings would initially be quite slow to update. In many old PC games, full-screen displays would visibly update with a smooth windowblinds effect. You couldn't do any better than that, because screen updates were dog slow.

What's funny is there was third-party software that would enable it on the Mac, Apple could have done it far earlier than MacOS X.

1993 PowerBook 145B (25 MHz 68030) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cQo29SIIgU

1994 PowerBook 540c (33 MHz 68040) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peWIysrf7DY this one is a bit chunkier in the video recording than real life since enabling the external video visibly slows the graphics down

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