Invisible scroll bars are a source of constant annoyance. And it sometimes takes me several attempts to move a window, because of all the various clickable things without visible boundaries. Frustrating.

I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab.

Probably also worth dropping this here in the off chance someone here will be part of today's lucky 10,000. http://toastytech.com/guis/

At first glance it looks like this is much more breadth over depth. Quite an array of systems here.

My favorites:

GEM + Ventura Publisher http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/ventura-publisher-1....

Viewpoint http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-p...

AUX http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/aux-3.0.1.png

It's suprising at first look that GEM tops my preferences but I recall having a very fond time on the Atari ST 520+. It had one of the best b/w monitors and TOS+GEM was orderly and uncluttered.

Only preemptive multitasking and per-window menus were missing. As a plus, the OS was in ROM, so boot times were <1s.

I love this kind of thing :) I finally have a second site to bookmark alongside this similar collection: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots

No Plan 9. Otherwise, resources like this might help studying how the interfaces of the past evolved (at least, on the surface).

No mention of GeOS!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Softworks

Alleycat in CGA just hit me hard.

For the people that didn’t live through this time, lining these images up makes it obvious why those that did speak of how visually impressive the Amiga was.

Previously:

Historical workstation desktop interface screenshots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191713 - June 2023 (55 comments)

Retrotechnology – PC desktop screenshots from 1983-2005 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968745 - Dec 2017 (58 comments)

I'm sure someone reading this thread has UAE handy in order to contribute a screenshot of AmigaOS/Workbench 1.x.

I miss the old days. Thirty years ago, 64MB of RAM was considered a thing (http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/winnt-4.0-ppc-new.in...)

For anyone pining for innovation in Desktop, a small part of this culture is still alive in Ricing competitions.

A recent favorite of mine is this one. Timestamp starts at the final submission being reviewed: https://youtu.be/DxEKF0cuEzc?si=mqE_2vpKDBsMWlKW&t=557

This is like porn for me :)

It's one of my favourite things, looking at and analyzing older interfaces. Some are lovely, some are cute, some are ugly, but most are... "naïve"? I love to think about the effort, the research, the trials and tribulations. I feel I will spend a great deal of time in this page!

This leaves me kind of sad, that we've had such little innovation in desktop / window-managers for 30 years.

Certainly it doesn't feel any easier to manage multiple windows than when we had a quarter of the screen space.

Let's talk about the HP-9000 as depicted in http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/hpwindows-starbase-u...

There is a `man` entry displayed in a terminal window there. The first Unix I've ever touched was HP-UX on an HP-9000 (server series, not the workstation one), and I have this memory that the underlined words you can see in that manpage as well were actually hyperlinks you can select and would bring you to the relevant section of the manpage that discussed that term. Am I fabricating that memory or is it real? I cannot find any info about it on the Internet.

I love old desktop OSes so much I've created a Windows 3.1 theme for mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909295

I kinda miss that in the early 2000's kde and gnome shipped with a fuck ton of window decorations based on all those (then-not-so) old OS. Teenager me had fun switching them every day and playing with windowing behavior (focus follows mouse! hover to select and only one click needed!). I wonder what techy kids today do to explore and have fun.

Speaking of the early 2000's, man, Aqua was such a good design. I appreciate the nextstep paradigm and design, but Aqua was just so futuristic, in a good way.

It's funny how early some things do and don't look familiar. A decent chunk of unix-family OSs have changed some since then, but also kinda not. CDE 1.0 looks almost exactly like the latest version:)

The Cambrian period of operating systems and GUIs.

There's a lot of nostalgia in the comments here. I wonder if any reader under say 25 is willing to comment; do you think OS's today are a regression? do those look better?

To me they look unwieldy, heavy and overwhelming and I can't help but think the love for them is just the love for youth or whatever

Where did the author get a copy of pre-X-integration NeWS, I wonder (if indeed they did). I haven’t been able to locate one online after a lot of determined searching, but I also can’t bring myself to declare that there isn’t one because the name is so ungoogleable.

great list, would be cool to see each OS evolving over time.

NextStep/OSX was the only desktop OS that did not feel like a downgrade from Amiga Workbench

Year of release for each would be extra awesome.

Deeply nostalgic! Thanks for sharing.

What a wonderful resource! HP VUE has interesting color choices and a nice "Dock"

Even the site with its NeXTStep style (love it).

> DECWindows

> /tmp/med_16.sixel

... Is that Sinfest? From before the author went weird? If so, then that's certainly a very different way of feeling old than I expected when clicking the link.

P.S.: There's another in "RiscOS 3.71", and "System V Release 4 Amiga Version 1.1" references Penny Arcade. [0]

[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/01/05/the-merch#

I love how little df has changed since 1985.

Sometime I wish time goes slower

That brings back memories from pre press days and the SGI Indigo machines. They did some heavy lifting for the time.

Amazing resource!

"We have learned nothing in 10,000 years."

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