Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

How cute… imagine my childhood home would have a computer with a graphical desktop…

I feel so old now…

Yeah as far as GUIs go, Win95 isn't in the "nostalgia" category for me, I was already well into adulthood.

I kind of get the appeal, but it's also unnecessarily skeumorphic/fake-3d and there were some UX things that made little sense especially lumping all the window controls all together (including the destructive "close" X) where MacOS smartly separated them.

The fake 3d is actually very useful in communicating what is a button or another interactive piece of the interface and what's not. The modern clean uis where everything is a thin rectangle or just text that you are supposed to click are a nightmare.

> where MacOS smartly separated them.

Interesting that modern macOS now have them next to each other, like Windows.

You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional. I'm still a firm believe that the majority of the work we do with computers today could be done within the Windows 95 shell. We need 64bit, more memory, faster CPUs, GPUs all that, but the modern UI aren't really "better", if anything many of them are more confusing. I think a lot of office works would be happy to just have kept the Window 95 era UI for Windows and Office.

Old screen caps of UIs with depth feel so relaxing to look at, and I don’t think it’s just a nostalgia effect.

It’s like there’s always just a little extra brain power and attention being used by modern flat UIs, and you get to shut that off when you look at a depth-enhanced UI.

I agree. Early Macs had to give buttons a 2D distinctive look. A good thing was that the look and feel were part of the OS and not the application, so everything would be consistent.

The most important part is that controls are consistent across applications. In that regard, tools and libraries that implement some look and feel rather than deferring it to the underlying environment are a disservice to users.

Windows, for instance, has dozens of ways to do that, and you can find parts of Windows that use an archeological version of the controls. Nobody, it seems, bothered to reimplement the older APIs on top of the new ones.

Though Apple has forgotten or ignored this in products like the Apple tv where restart and factory reset are right next to each other.

> You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional.

Ironically, the Windows 95 look seems a lot like a copy of the NeXT look, which is the OS all modern Macs are kind of running.

Yeah frankly I'd take the NeXT UI over any of them, including Mac OS X, which felt like a huge step backwards to me compared to NeXTstep

EDIT: Sun's OpenLook is the other one from that era that was fantastic

Especially when you're using that tiny trackpad remote. Overall, Apple TV works, but most of the apps UX suck, and that's not Apple's fault.

Yeah. My first computer I soldered the chips/resistors/capacitors/etc to the PCB... It had 1K of RAM, and the screen memory had to come out of that too...

Someone wrote chess for it.

[aside] It was a Sinclair ZX-81, and I was 11 at the time. My parents bought the kit and a second-hand black & white TV with a dial-tuner (no pushbuttons to change the channel) as an Xmas present ...

I loved the TV, it was my TV when we only had one other in the house. I watched everything on that TV (even snooker and swore I could tell which ball was which)... After a couple of months, my dad started to get annoyed I'd not bothered to build the computer, so I was dispatched to the shed to build it.

A few days later (hey, I was in school), the thing worked and I was working my way through the (rather excellent) manual that came with it, getting to know it. One of the logic chapters had an example:

[P]RINT 1+1=2

(It was tokenised input, so you just pressed P and PRINT would come up in the built-in BASIC). Anyone here can see that the answer would be logical-true because 1+1 does equal 2, and indeed the computer printed "1" on the next line.

Anyway, flush with this futuristic knowledge, I set it all up using the family TV in the lounge, and we went through the same thing, just to prove to everyone that it worked...

[P]RINT 1+1=2

1

"I knew it. You've buggered it", said my dad in disgust as he got up and walked out the room. I tried to explain the (new to me) concept of logical truth to him and how the computer represented it, but I don't think he ever really believed me...

[/aside]

Anyway, that Sinclair ZX81 fundamentally changed my life. Computers and computing opened up a whole new world. Some 45 years later I'm about to retire from Apple as one of their most senior engineers, having been here for the last 20 years. Anyone with any Apple device is running some of the software I've written over the years which is kind of cool, but it's time to bow out.

The window decorations in Win95 are in fact pixel-for-pixel copies of the ones in NeXTSTEP.

Note that NeXTstep actually did the right thing with window controls -- close is on opposite side of the window from the others, so you can't accidentally hit it.

Windows3 and Motif hid this stuff under a menu, so wasn't a huge concern.

But then Windows95, and then (oddly) MacOS through this away in favour of throwing them all together.

Awareness of spatial patterns / frequency of use seems to have been higher among early UX/UI designers than after. I guess maybe because mice became more accurate?

> I'm still a firm believe that the majority of the work we do with computers today could be done within the Windows 95 shell.

Wasn't that one of the ideas behind SerenityOS?