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  • 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.

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

  • Amazing walk through memory lane, and super useful. One big omission though - starting in the early 1990s, we should be seeing some Linux desktops in there, but I didn’t see any through 1995 or so when I stopped browsing. Also, Irix would be nice to get — although I don’t recall if SGI had much in the way of custom vibes for their window managers, they certainly had amazingly cool 3D demos.

    A nice vibe coding project here would be to show these in a carousel with the UI being 1:1 pixels. It’s hard to understand just how different NeXTStep (Did I capitalize that correctly?) felt from Windows — part of it was refresh rates, but part of it was going from 800x600 to 1132x800-ish on the monitor. Color, refresh rates, monitor quality, a cool plastic color and design for the box were all part of the experience.

  • You might be looking at these old Unix GUIs thinking they're shit compared to now, but actually, at the time, they were shit too.
  • 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.

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