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

This still remains the absolute pinnacle of cohesive desktop environment design in my books.

I think the desktop operating systems of that era were at a sweet spot. They were technically advanced enough to render good-looking, crisp color user interfaces. However, most people were still novices at using computers, so OS designers consciously designed their operating systems to be as clear as possible. Applications tended to be written for each individual platform and to follow its UI guidelines.

Windows 95, NT, System 7 and System 8, BeOS, and NextSTEP all had really clear UX. You always knew where to drag a window, what was clickable, where to find settings, etc.

An aspect of System 7/Mac OS 8/9 that I find criminally underrated is how flexible it is.

For those versions, a good bulk of the “system” isn’t part of the system proper but instead implemented by way of extensions and control panels loaded at startup. The OS itself is extremely minimal, basically just enough to provide a barebones desktop and act as a substrate for apps to run on. Everything else, including “core” functionality like audio and networking, was implemented in an extension.

This meant that you could pare back the OS to be extremely lean and only have the exact functionality you personally needed at that precise moment and nothing else, and doing so didn’t require you to recompile a kernel or anything like that — just create an extension set that only loaded what you needed. This was excellent for use cases like games and emulators where you wanted every last ounce of resources to go to those, and nice for single purpose machines too (no point in loading game controller support on a box that only ever runs Photoshop and Illustrator).

Of course the way it was implemented is awful by modern standards, but the concept is golden and I think there should be OS projects trying to replicate it.

I remember creating different extension sets using the built-in Extension Manager and the third-party tool Conflict Catcher. I had sets for gaming, video editing, and normal usage. It was a simple matter of selecting the correct set and rebooting. Or you could hit shift on startup and start into a minimal system without any extensions.

There's a good reason the third-party extension manager was called "Conflict Catcher," but the power and flexibility such a system grants users is unmatched.

"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." -- Douglas Adams

> However, most people were still novices at using computers

It has (to my surprise, initially) been my experience that "kids these days" are more novice at (desktop) computer-usage than the people of the 90s