
Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002 (2015) - beefhash
https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/
======
mikedelfino
There's a 2015 edition as well:
[https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-
developer...](https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developers--
2002-vs.-2015/)

~~~
dpau
"Still just a browser window and a ton of terminals hiding behind them."
-Rasmus Lerdorf

Yep :)

~~~
smudgymcscmudge
The biggest difference is I added git status to my shell prompt sometime
between 2002 and 2015.

------
AdmiralAsshat
>Richard Stallman:

>I don’t know how to make a screenshot, because I normally use my computer in
text-mode. I have X and GNOME installed, but I use them only occasionally.

I find it weird that the man is such a visionary in concept, but such a
Luddite in actual day-to-day. Elsewhere, I've seen him explain that he still
"views" most webpages by cURL'ing them and printing them to paper.

~~~
awake
He walks the walk and talks the talk. People may think he’s backwards or
annoying but he’s consistently maintained his philosophy that software should
be free. The fact that he has to use absurd measures to consume what everyone
else does is a statement about the limitations of free software not a
statement about his workflow preferences.

~~~
saas_sam
Does he think every written product should be free, or just software? Or is he
just against paying people for their time?

~~~
bunderbunder
It's probably best to get that from the horse's mouth:

[https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html)

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html)

~~~
saas_sam
Thank you! Very helpful.

------
pavlov
Ergonomics research has shown a long time ago that dark text on light
background is easier to read on computer screens for long periods of time.
These screenshots demonstrate that developers in 2002 had got the message.

Young developers nowadays seem to mostly use dark backgrounds, which to me
feels like a weird '70s throwback. I suspect it's primarily an identity
signal: it's harder to feel like you're hacking The Matrix if your IDE looks
like Word from a distance.

~~~
Crinus
> Young developers nowadays seem to mostly use dark backgrounds, which to me
> feels like a weird '70s throwback

Everything "young developers" nowadays do seem to me a weird '70s throwback -
from the proliferation of the command line (as opposed to actually trying to
create advanced GUI tools for people who know what they are doing, like a lot
of developers did in the late 90s/early 2000s whereas today you mainly have
dumbed down GNOME 3 lookalikes), to using tiling and lightweight window
managers "for performance" on "low end computers" when those low end computers
have massive supercomputer abilities compared to the computers that people
used -again- in the 90s with UIs that did _WAY_ more stuff despite their
limited performance, to having crude dumb TUIs that look and behave worse than
what you'd get in DOS in the 80s, etc.

~~~
MisterTea
You seem to be confused, developers work with text. What more can computing
power bring to text? The only thing all that CPU and GPU power brought to the
desktop is useless power wasting eye candy like beryl or whatever it's called
now.

Plus, in this environmentally conscious time, isn't it nice that people want
to do more with less? Why waste GPU cycles adding shadows and lens flares to
text? I don't get it.

I like using tiling WM's (dwm and Awesome) because they organize windows for
me and nothing is hidden in a bar. The concept of workspaces is much nicer
than shuffling windows around a screen. I can quickly jump between workspaces
and immediatly see my windows and contents. What more do I need? GPU rendering
of windows? Why?

I along with many others enjoy doing more with less. My old i3 Thinkpad runs
just fine. Plays youtube videos, streams music and edits text using OpenBSD.
What more do I need? Why pointlessly throw more at a problem that doesn't need
it?

~~~
Crinus
> You seem to be confused

No i am not confused, i'm perfectly aware of what i am seeing and writing,
thank you.

> developers work with text. What more can computing power bring to text?

This is highly myopic, there is more to development tools that just source
code and even visualization of source code and programs do benefit from being
able to work with graphics. There is more to computing and programming than a
70s terminal.

And people use computers for more than programming.

> I like using tiling WM's (dwm and Awesome) because they organize windows for
> me and nothing is hidden in a bar. The concept of workspaces is much nicer
> than shuffling windows around a screen. I can quickly jump between
> workspaces and immediatly see my windows and contents.

Sure, although workspaces are available in overlapping window setups too. The
rest you mention are just personal preferences, my comment weren't about
liking tiling window managers over overlapping windows, it was about using
those (and lightweight window managers - i included overlapping window
managers too there) using them due to their resource use.

> What more do I need? GPU rendering of windows? Why?

I don't know but i have a feeling you'll just call irrelevant whatever i
suggest.

But honestly...

> I along with many others enjoy doing more with less. My old i3 Thinkpad runs
> just fine. Plays youtube videos, streams music and edits text using OpenBSD.
> What more do I need? Why pointlessly throw more at a problem that doesn't
> need it?

...i think you totally missed the point of what i wrote. My point wasn't to
throw more at a problem and especially not be wasteful about resources. Using
and -especially- writing efficient software doesn't imply 70s terminal UIs.

A Pentium at 133MHz with 32MB of RAM, a machine that is a fraction of power of
even the first Raspberry Pi, can run at comfortable performance an interface
as rich as Windows 98. Even the lowest of the low performance laptops you can
get your hands on today will have a ton more power, yet people treat it like
it isn't anything more than a dumb terminal.

~~~
pasabagi
I don't really like the sound of my computer fan - so while it's nice to have
a relatively good cpu, I still don't want it to be running flat-out all the
time. Also, I'm not really sure what the point is of GUIs, other than looking
flashy. I do a lot of 3D modeling, and I really don't like clicking around the
menus whenever I have to. I figure that's just taste.

~~~
Crinus
If you think that GUIs == Flashy, then i think you have a very narrow view of
what GUIs are. Also a GUI does not have to be processing intensive and unless
you have configured Linux to not use a graphical console _and_ you are not
using X or Wayland, you are already using a GUI. It is just that all your GUI
does is draw text (which, btw, is among the most processing intensive things
that a GUI can do).

------
nabla9
What? No screenshot from Donald Knuth's desktop!

here: [https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/screen.jpeg](https://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/screen.jpeg)

And here is the config file: [https://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/.fvwm2rc](https://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/.fvwm2rc)

~~~
pgtan
fvwm with FvwmPager: best "desktop" forever!

~~~
nabla9
This is the truth.

------
rudiv
Some of those fonts make my head swim. I'm glad the quality of desktop
typography has improved so much in the recent past. Also, I will always be
scared of the people with strange cursive fonts like CmdrTaco. It's like
people who use that comic sans-esque font that comes as a pre-installed option
on Samsung phones.

~~~
userbinator
_It 's like people who use that comic sans-esque font that comes as a pre-
installed option on Samsung phones._

"I want to be different"... just like the millions of others who also choose
that font.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Still less common than the default.

------
samdung
I seem to be falling in love with the data density of the old layouts.
Nowadays i need to scroll endlessly to see little information.

~~~
moreira
Old designs used to fit more data in 1024x768 (or 800x600) than we get now in
high-res, high-DPI widescreen displays.

There's a personal finance app I use that was recently modernised, and it went
from being able to show me 50 transactions on a 1920x1080 screen to barely
being able to display little over 10 transactions at a time. No improvement,
just... padding.

~~~
jodrellblank
[https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

 _this calendar widget. [..] My gripe with this design aesthetic is the loss
of information density. I 'm an adult human being sitting at a large display,
with a mouse and keyboard. I deserve better. Not every interface should be
designed for someone surfing the web from their toilet._

 _Here 's what the PayPal site used to look like. I never fell to my knees to
thank God for giving me the gift of sight so that I might behold the beauty of
the old PayPal interface. But it got the job done. Here's the PayPal website
as it looks today. The biggest element on the page is an icon chastising me
that I haven't told PayPal what I look like. Next to that is a useless offer
to 'download the app', and then an offer for a credit card. I can no longer
control the sort order, there are no filter tools, and you see there are far
fewer entries visible without scrolling._

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> If you're only displaying five sentences of text, use vanilla HTML. Hell,
> serve a textfile!

I like this author. Current size of my entire personal site is just under
900k, including all downloads, the blog, and images. You could read it on a
TI-83 with the right software, a modem, and a dialup account. Could probably
even display the images since they're 1bpp bitmaps.

------
zx2c4
"I don’t know how to make a screenshot, because I normally use my computer in
text-mode." \--Richard Stallman

------
jl6
I tend to hit print screen randomly every few weeks, and have been for a
number of years. It’s like photography for when I’m not outside - it amounts
to a near record of my ways of working over the years.

~~~
dev_dull
I used to do this too. For me they were only interesting until I started my
career. Now those screenshots are just the default Mac background with a few
apps hidden in the launch bar.

The things in person in real life, on the other hand, have become much more
interesting!

------
jlv2
Jon Hall's desktop shows exmh running. I did a bunch of work on that long ago
(90s). His two screenshots highlight two of my contributions (both of which
live on today).

I wrote the folder display in the upper pane (I'm really proud of this
result).

I also worked on the abomination of a 'pick' interface.

~~~
catacombs
Weird flex but OK.

------
darshanime
People say Russ Cox was inspired to use acme after looking at Ritchie's
desktop. Probably even this picture.

------
nurettin
I love how some of them used Phoenix (earlier name of the firefox project). It
was a fresh breath after netscape and explorer. Even the earliest versions
supported multiple tabs, advanced CSS and adobe flash containers.

[https://website-
archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...](https://website-
archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_releasenotes/en-
US/firefox/releases/0.5.html)

~~~
cowmix
Most are using the Mozilla browser it seems (like Luke Mewburn).

------
sehugg
The only IDE I see is TTimo from id using Anjunta:
[http://anjuta.org/](http://anjuta.org/)

------
dba7dba
Ahh. I was told by a CS student in 2005 or so that knowing just some Unix
commands would get me a good job. I even took an introductory class based on
this. But I never pursued it that diligently. And now 20 years later, I am
learning Linux and plus many other related stuff. Should've listened to the
recommendation 20 years earlier.

------
neilv
I did all sorts of desktop and window manager things over the years, but the
last few years, I'm very happy with a tweaked tiling window manager with
workspaces (currently based around XMonad).

All screen real estate is used for window content, except for a few pixels for
borders. Currently no persistent panel or status display of any kind. I
already known what workspace I'm on, based on the windows there, and I know
what workspaces I've been using. When I need to see the clock, I've rigged a
keypress to display it. I occasionally miss having system loadavg info
displayed all the time, but I prefer using that screen real estate for an
extra lines of code or text.

I've made a bunch of keybindings that start an application or switch focus to
it if it's already running.

------
hestefisk
I wish I could move desktop back in time to Gnome 1, gkrellm and Linux. So
simple, yet so neat.

~~~
geggam
XFCE4 still runs like that. Personally I prefer a well configured Fluxbox

------
yegortimoshenko
Huh, 5 out of 15 interviewed developers referred to their desktop as "boring".

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Yes, I don't even customize mine. I leave the OS, tools in default
configurations. I do my work in the cloud. If my computer is hit by
lightening, I toss it in the dumpster and get another one. Back to work within
an hour.

My toaster is also boring, and my pipe wrench, and my floor jack. Just tools.

------
tambourine_man
“Unix people” sounds like an archeological term to me, like the Clovis people.

------
mullikine
Yay! An old emacs screenshot and an early vim. I'm satisfied. Brian
Kernighan's is the most beautiful though. Such purity

~~~
wyclif
I agree...simplicity reveals the pure beauty of life.

------
DannyB2
It is interesting how many of those screenshots include an open web browser.

~~~
catacombs
How is that interesting?

------
jedberg
Mine would look like Jordan Hubbard's, because by 2002 I'd replaced my Slack
linux running fvwm with MacOS (on a Mac desktop I'd picked up for free from
the e-waste bin at Berkeley!)

------
Retr0spectrum
It would be really interesting to see a follow-up 17(!) years later.

~~~
vortico
Here it was 15 years later. [https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-
from-developer...](https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-
developers--2002-vs.-2015/)

~~~
geggam
Heh... This one makes laugh. A port maintainer has his desktop config in Salt

'screenshot as code', I maintain my desktop configuration through saltstack:
[https://github.com/TTimo/linux-
salted/commits/master](https://github.com/TTimo/linux-salted/commits/master)

------
pradn
For screenshots of current *nix desktops from enthusiasts:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn)

------
bgeeek
I'm sure there are other sites, but one that I follow: /r/unixporn on reddit.

------
kingofpandora
> Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP)

I assume that is a picture of PHP while it is being designed.

------
VectorLock
I'm amused that jkh is browsing Jerkcity in his screenshot.

~~~
joezydeco
Gotta wonder... We know Rands worked at Apple, and so did Hubbard. Is Hubbard
the person behind Spigot?

