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

(github.com)
567 points elvis70 | 4 comments | 30 Mar 25 15:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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rbanffy ◴[30 Mar 25 15:41 UTC] No.43525012[source]▶
How cute… imagine my childhood home would have a computer with a graphical desktop…

I feel so old now…

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cmrdporcupine ◴[30 Mar 25 16:18 UTC] No.43525268[source]▶
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.

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1. abraxas ◴[30 Mar 25 16:24 UTC] No.43525327[source]▶
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.
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2. alabastervlog ◴[30 Mar 25 16:28 UTC] No.43525359[source]▶
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.

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3. rbanffy ◴[30 Mar 25 16:28 UTC] No.43525360[source]▶
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.
4. rbanffy ◴[30 Mar 25 16:33 UTC] No.43525403[source]▶
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.