In retrospect, Win95 didn’t get enough recognition for its UI. Most elements were simple, clear, with high contrast, and had a decent look given constraints of low-color displays and the hardware it had to work on.
I hope the fashion of flat mystery meat navigation will end and we’ll somehow circle back to the Win95 style.
I don’t disagree, but even in 94, so much of Windows 95 styling was aped directly from NEXTSTEP that I have a hard time giving it credit for much. Windows NT, on a technical level, sure: lots of genuinely awesome stuff suddenly showing up on consumer-grade hardware. But I’m unwilling to give Windows 95 styling much credit when it’s basically just copying something that had been on the scene since the late 80s.
In a way, Windows 95 was the last of a line of somewhat sane UIs, but also the start of the deterioration due to the hype of the WWW and the hyperlink. Windows 95 already had a few of those underlined words that looked like links but were really “active” elements. In Windows 98, they went full on with this and the Internet Explorer integration into the desktop background, where the background wallpaper was just a webpage. There, so many words were underlined but weren’t really “links” - they didn’t take you from the current page to another, but would start applications or caused changes in state and other completely unpredictable things.
Windows 95 also allowed applications to do many crazy things (not sure if Windows 3.11 allowed for a similar level of craziness). For example, many third party applications just drew their own window decorations and so on, making it a total inconsistent mess.
I am rather enjoying all of this hearkening back to a simpler time. Between this and SerenityOS I feel like people are recognizing that we are drowning in a sea of complexity thinly veiled by bright shiny dancing bears.
One of the reasons I purchased an Atari 800XL off of eBay a few months back is because it’s a SIMPLE model of computing! You can truly understand the entire machine, like, with one un-assisted human brain. Really. You can read a relatively thin book and grok it DEEPLY.
That is beautiful and is something that is sorely missing from the modern computing landscape.
P.S. This is why projects like Fujinet get me so excited. It is a perfect melding of the new world of rampant complexity with the beautiful, elegant old world of simplicity enforced by necessity. I <3 everything about it :) And while I don’t own Coleco Adam hardware I also <3 the fact that Thomas Cherryhomes has ported the entire stack to the Coleco Adam. I wish I had a giant house so I could sit atop my horde of retro hardware and play with it in my non existent spare time :)
This post would be much better if it didn’t so explicitly and emphatically call out “exactly” when it isn’t remotely close to exact. The real thing still looks much better in many obvious ways.
But I do like the win95 look, my own widget toolkit defaults to something very similar to it and i find the windows 95 gtk themes to be among the least bad of the options there. That said, I actually like a lot about its successors’ looks too. Gradients <3
I, too, would be here for this. TBH, I have a great nostalgia for Classic Mac OS; ok, sure, rebooting all the damn time was a drag, but being able to copy the System folder to my RAM disk and then reboot literally in seconds …
Well. Surely the world of computing has progressed, but I can’t help feel like something has been lost.
Booting from a RAM disk was gone I think as early as the first PPC, which is the 6100 from around 1991. But I agree that there were a lot of really neat features that were sort of lost to time.
One thing that was super cool was MacsBug. You copy a file into the system folder and reboot, and then if you just press a button on the computer or a modified 3-finger salute it would drop into a debugger with a disassembler, register values, peeking/poking, jumping to different parts of memory, and more.
I don’t think it’s even possible to do anything like that anymore (on any modern operating system) without a separate debugger host attached to a special kernel in some sort of debug mode, sometimes even with special hardware.
There’s also unusual spacing around the menus and title bar. The problem is they’re falling right in the uncanny valley: it’s really close, but it’s so close that it fails if it’s not perfect.
In retrospect, Win95 didn’t get enough recognition for its UI. Most elements were simple, clear, with high contrast, and had a decent look given constraints of low-color displays and the hardware it had to work on.
I hope the fashion of flat mystery meat navigation will end and we’ll somehow circle back to the Win95 style.
I don’t disagree, but even in 94, so much of Windows 95 styling was aped directly from NEXTSTEP that I have a hard time giving it credit for much. Windows NT, on a technical level, sure: lots of genuinely awesome stuff suddenly showing up on consumer-grade hardware. But I’m unwilling to give Windows 95 styling much credit when it’s basically just copying something that had been on the scene since the late 80s.
I wish more oses would just copy instead of trying to reinvent the world.
There are lots of thinks that Mac Os/Windows can learn from each other.
I can relate to the giving correct credit aspect, obviously.
In a way, Windows 95 was the last of a line of somewhat sane UIs, but also the start of the deterioration due to the hype of the WWW and the hyperlink. Windows 95 already had a few of those underlined words that looked like links but were really “active” elements. In Windows 98, they went full on with this and the Internet Explorer integration into the desktop background, where the background wallpaper was just a webpage. There, so many words were underlined but weren’t really “links” - they didn’t take you from the current page to another, but would start applications or caused changes in state and other completely unpredictable things.
Windows 95 also allowed applications to do many crazy things (not sure if Windows 3.11 allowed for a similar level of craziness). For example, many third party applications just drew their own window decorations and so on, making it a total inconsistent mess.
I am rather enjoying all of this hearkening back to a simpler time. Between this and SerenityOS I feel like people are recognizing that we are drowning in a sea of complexity thinly veiled by bright shiny dancing bears.
One of the reasons I purchased an Atari 800XL off of eBay a few months back is because it’s a SIMPLE model of computing! You can truly understand the entire machine, like, with one un-assisted human brain. Really. You can read a relatively thin book and grok it DEEPLY.
That is beautiful and is something that is sorely missing from the modern computing landscape.
P.S. This is why projects like Fujinet get me so excited. It is a perfect melding of the new world of rampant complexity with the beautiful, elegant old world of simplicity enforced by necessity. I <3 everything about it :) And while I don’t own Coleco Adam hardware I also <3 the fact that Thomas Cherryhomes has ported the entire stack to the Coleco Adam. I wish I had a giant house so I could sit atop my horde of retro hardware and play with it in my non existent spare time :)
This post would be much better if it didn’t so explicitly and emphatically call out “exactly” when it isn’t remotely close to exact. The real thing still looks much better in many obvious ways.
But I do like the win95 look, my own widget toolkit defaults to something very similar to it and i find the windows 95 gtk themes to be among the least bad of the options there. That said, I actually like a lot about its successors’ looks too. Gradients <3
Chicago 95 is nothing new. The fonts in the screenshots don’t match Windows’s, and that’s a huge difference.
I’d prefer a modern A/UX to Win95 really - anyone made a Mac Classic Platinum look-alike on a Unix core?
I, too, would be here for this. TBH, I have a great nostalgia for Classic Mac OS; ok, sure, rebooting all the damn time was a drag, but being able to copy the System folder to my RAM disk and then reboot literally in seconds …
Well. Surely the world of computing has progressed, but I can’t help feel like something has been lost.
Booting from a RAM disk was gone I think as early as the first PPC, which is the 6100 from around 1991. But I agree that there were a lot of really neat features that were sort of lost to time.
One thing that was super cool was MacsBug. You copy a file into the system folder and reboot, and then if you just press a button on the computer or a modified 3-finger salute it would drop into a debugger with a disassembler, register values, peeking/poking, jumping to different parts of memory, and more.
I don’t think it’s even possible to do anything like that anymore (on any modern operating system) without a separate debugger host attached to a special kernel in some sort of debug mode, sometimes even with special hardware.
ISTR being able to boot from a RAM disk on my 8600, but that might just be brain worms.
There’s also unusual spacing around the menus and title bar. The problem is they’re falling right in the uncanny valley: it’s really close, but it’s so close that it fails if it’s not perfect.
Yeah the difference between “almost exactly” and “exactly” is enormous.
I do like the idea that 1995 may some day be the year of Linux on the desktop.
what about the elephant in the room: client side decorations? What about QT applications?
This is really cool but couldn’t you just run everything in Wine or Dosbox or Virtualbox?
Better not! That would expose the author’s misuse of ‘exact’ 😜