
Retrotechnology – PC desktop screenshots from 1983-2005 - pavlov
http://www.typewritten.org/Media/
======
zeveb
Ah, A/UX! As a boy I wanted nothing more than to install it on my dad's
computer — but of course back then it cost tremendous amounts of money, and it
may not have been compatible with the software he wanted to run.

Also, is it just me or were BeOS & Macintosh Systems 7 & 8 the high point of
colour GUIs? I've never seen anything since which looks as nice.

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ashark
Ahhhh, depth. How I miss you. Sigh. Well, back to my flat-everything-for-no-
real-reason modern digital life.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Give it three years, and the UX community will revert back to something else.

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eterm
1280x1024 seems incredible for 1990, were people using those resolutions at
the time?

It seems weird to think I'm reading this on a monitor with less vertical
resolution than that some 27 years later.

~~~
pavlov
In the mid-'80s the workstation PC vendors like Sun were competing to
introduce a "3M computer". The three 'M's were megabyte, megapixel, MIPS:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer)

In the thirty years since, we've got fifty thousand times more performance (a
recent Intel desktop CPU easily does 50,000 MIPS) and sixteen thousand times
more memory... But most computers barely have two megapixel screens.

~~~
aidenn0
Imagine describing the scene of someone running the Atom editor on a 1080p
laptop to someone from the 90s who complained about Eight Megabytes And
Constantly Swapping[1]. It would seem so odd; 8GB of ram, 4 cores running
billions of instructions per second each. Also there's a terraflop scale
massively parallel supercomputer with 2GB of RAM dedicated to drawing
overlapping windows.

1: Backronym for "EMACS"

~~~
Zelizz
That's one of the reasons that I'm actually a little excited for Moore's Law
coming to an end. For years it has been more economical to program quickly and
somewhat wastefully, leaving many people with slower computers behind. Now the
economics are changing, and the competition will be in creating the most
efficient software, to everyone's benefit.

~~~
nikanj
We just moved everything to the cloud, where you can microservices your way to
even more wasted MIPS. In the past, your text editor only wasted both cores on
your laptop, but now it can waste all the cores on half a dozen AWS instances.

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haZard_OS
Packard Bell 486 was my first desktop. I remember working on a green screen at
school and discovering the CLI. I probably crashed half of the school's
computers just playing around.

~~~
tetraca
I had one at home, tinkering around and learning to program in QBASIC on it. I
wish I still had it just to experience the certain charm of doing things the
way you used to do them, but it sadly stopped consistently booting over a
decade ago.

~~~
ashark
I'd pay $300 (maybe more) _right now_ for a tiny, durably-housed (I'd be
letting my kids use it) 486-alike machine with a smallish integrated-into-
housing LCD and keyboard, and maaaaybe a mouse and an old-school joystick/pad
or two, but their absence is in no way a deal-breaker, running legit MS-DOS
6.x or something 100% compatible (not sure how FreeDOS is on the compatibility
front) with some reasonable solution for getting software onto it over USB or
SDCard or something. And a foolproof factory-reset hardware switch. No moving
parts a must.

~~~
ghaff
I know this may not qualify as "durably housed" but maybe get your hands on an
old Netbook or similar laptop? I'd probably give FreeDOS a try for the OS.
It's still supported to some degree and is probably better than getting your
hands on an old MS-DOS or DR-DOS that hasn't been touched in years. It was
good enough for a couple of the major PC makers to ship it on a few models in
later years.

You could build something for kicks but a laptop would be a lot easier and
probably cheaper.

[ADDED: I have an old laptop I don't use for anything any more. I may give
this a try myself.]

~~~
ashark
My kids are very young and there are three of them. I struggle to find time
when my brain's not already totally fried to finish even simple 1-2 hour
projects, let alone re-housing a laptop to be kid proof and fiddling to get
DOS drivers working on it, as much fun as that kind of thing might have been
to 5-years-ago-me. This many kids+full-time work is roughly equivalent to
having a 90-hour-a-week job. I'd rather pay for a finished product—otherwise
it'll never happen, and if I try I'll just have a mess somewhere in the house
that I'll fiddle with for 30 minutes every few weeks, never making progress.
Gotta pick my battles.

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deadmetheny
What a blast to the past. I love seeing old systems, makes me want to get a
couple of older machines just to play around with them.

BeOS in particular is a huge lament on what could have been - at the time, it
was the slickest OS I had ever had the chance to play with and loved it
dearly. I appreciate the Haiku project, but sadly I don't know how much of a
place it truly has in the modern world beyond being a nostalgia toy.

~~~
waddlesplash
Well, we're (Haiku) still the snappiest OS around, and while we're
continuously playing catch-up, there are a number of people who do use it as
their daily driver. Don't give up hope yet. :)

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JeanMarcS
Alleycat ! Am I that old ???

~~~
rzzzt
Defeat that pesky broom:
[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Alley_Cat_1984](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Alley_Cat_1984)

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rbanffy
That's a wonderful collection of images. Specially interesting are the ones
showing Unix on Acorn and Atari TT computers.

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smcl
Does anyone know why those chunky, slightly unattractive fonts were so common
- even sometimes in the cases of a higher-res screen? A couple of the examples
of what I'm talking about...

Here's Risc OS 3.10: [http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/risc-
os-3.10.png](http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/risc-os-3.10.png)

It's an older system with a relatively row resolution but each letter looks
(to me) to be stretched vertically (or squeezed horizontally) - if you look at
the elements on the windows (like the X or the border on the scroll-bars) you
can see that this isn't simply a case of not having enough pixels available

This Amiga Workbench 3.5 one is another nice example:
[http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/workbench-3.5-retina...](http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/workbench-3.5-retinaz3-256color.png)

The font seems really chunky to me and the environment clearly supports
"better" (very subjective, I know)

I missed this era by a few years - maybe someone can shed some light on
whether the window systems themselves were impressive enough on their own, or
perhaps people found them more familiar (like they stuck around after moving
from command-line to GUI)?

I get that I'm coming from an age where we have extremely high dpi screens and
font anti-aliasing etc, but I've also worked with 5x7 and even 3x7 fonts (see
[http://blog.mclemon.io/arduino-5x8-iso-8859-2-font](http://blog.mclemon.io/arduino-5x8-iso-8859-2-font)
and [http://blog.mclemon.io/hacking-a-tiny-new-font-for-the-
ssd13...](http://blog.mclemon.io/hacking-a-tiny-new-font-for-the-
ssd1306-128x64-oled-screen)) and the systems above looked like they could
support better than this.

~~~
C6C6C6C
Some older computers had weird resolution / aspect ratio combination.

[https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FelipePepe/20150423/241730/N...](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FelipePepe/20150423/241730/No_MSDOS_games_werent_widescreen_Tips_on_correcting_aspect_ratio.php)

Basically, if you play video games from the DOS era on a modern computer
without correcting their aspect ratio they look stretched, and that was not
how they were supposed to look.

So, the same goes for fonts. They look weird if you look at it with your
current resolution and aspect ratio. They would look more condensed/thinner on
the CRT monitors of the DOS era.

> The thing is, most MS-DOS games were actually rendered in 320x200, which is
> a 16:10 aspect ratio and thus widescreen – but they weren't displayed that
> way. I won't pretend I know all the technical details – there are way better
> sources for that – simply put, the CRT monitors back then stretched images
> to fit the screen.

> The 320x200 image was stretched to fit the entire 4:3 screen, to something
> close to 320x240. What today we see as a sharp, square pixel was actually a
> blurry rectangle back then, about 20% taller than wider (the Amiga, Apple
> II, Atari ST and other home computers all had different resolutions, but the
> principle is quite similar).

Even if you're lowering your current monitor resolution you're not actually
seeing those fonts the way they were meant to be rendered. That's because your
monitor will display a native DOS resolution as widescreen. When CRT monitors
of the time took that widescreen resolution and turned it square.

There's a lot of understanding about old rendering methods that has been lost
in the mainstream. The article I linked also showed how people exploited
scanlines to make water look transparent in a very smoothed way. Your LCD
pixel grid just doesn't show things the way old low resolution CRTs did.

~~~
IncRnd
> The 320x200 image was stretched to fit the entire 4:3 screen, to something
> close to 320x240.

Not necessarily _close_ to 320x240. Linearly addressable mode X was 320x240.

~~~
Narishma
Very few games bothered with mode X. Most used the much easier to program mode
13h.

~~~
IncRnd
Unchained made int 13h easier than regular int 13h, but what about mode x was
much more difficult to program? You got a faster display, square 4:3 pixels,
and double buffering in 256 colors.

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cr0sh
Does anyone know if the source code to those SunOS graphic demos are
available? I'd love to see and play with the suncube code especially. I tried
to find it, but the best I found was an old tape archive file of SunOS 2.0 -
and I have no idea how to easily restore that (plus, I doubt source code was
included, and it was for m68k - so yeah, it might take some work to get it
running again, if a VM exists).

EDIT: I did find out information about something called "TME" The Machine
Emulator
([http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/](http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/))
which apparently can emulate various m68k systems to run SunOS on top of, so
in theory, I might be able to get this tape archive installed and running.

But again, I doubt that the source code is included, which is what I'd really
like to see...

~~~
cr0sh
For future explorers:

I found this:

[https://winworldpc.com/product/sunos/4x](https://winworldpc.com/product/sunos/4x)

Download the file "SunOS 4.1.4 Solaris 1.1.2 Source" \- go to the "demos"
directory and a bit of searching you can find the "suncube.c" file.

Lots of dependencies on "suncore" graphics libs and such, but the code is
there. Also - check out the /games folder - it has C source in it for
"adventure", "hack" (nethack), and "trek" (star trek).

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oliv__
Wow. You can just see exactly where MacOS came from when you see that GEM
Xerox Ventura screenshot...

I also love the suntools screens: so simple and nicely contrasted. What OS is
that?

EDIT: this really makes me sad we only have like 3 major OSs now, I never knew
how much I was missing until I saw all this.

~~~
grzm
There's definitely a similarity, but you've got the causal chain reversed (if
there is one). The GEM UI was influenced by the Mac, at least determined
judicially. This was the source of the initial "look-and-feel" lawsuit Apple
won in the 80s.

> _" At this point, Apple Computer sued DRI in what would turn into a long
> dispute over the "look and feel" of the GEM/1 system, which was an almost
> direct copy of Macintosh (with some elements bearing a closer resemblance to
> those in the earlier Lisa, available since January 1983)."_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#GEM/1)

It's not surprising, though, given that Lee Lorenzen, formerly of Xerox PARC,
wrote much of the code.

~~~
oliv__
Oh interesting, I assumed it was the other way around because of the word
"Xerox" in the name.

I can see why they sued...

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chronial
The MS operating systems are weirdly underrepresented in this collection.

~~~
C6C6C6C
They're actually represented just about right if the screenshot collection
goal is to show changes throughout time. There's screenshots of Windows 2.1,
3.0 and NT 4.0. Windows from 95 to 2000 kept the exact same look. There's
absolutely no point in having a screenshot of each iteration in between.
There's just not enough visual and conceptual UI change to really make it
worth it having shots of 95, 98, NT4, ME, 2000. A shot of any of these will
speak for the entire timeframe.

Compare this shot of Windows 2000 to the one of NT4 they feature on their page
:

[https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/win2000ad...](https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/win2000advserv.png)

See any major change? right.

Windows XP is missing but in a way it might not count as retro enough because
it has lived and been with us for far, far longer than most OS usually do.

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michrassena
That's the first Intergraph gui on CLIX I've seen. I almost still regret not
buying two Intergraph computers at auction a decade ago. I still somehow ended
up with a Clipper CPU board though. The last I searched the Internet, there
just isn't much information about these machines.

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apetresc
I've never heard of SunTools before – did they really have 1152x900 resolution
back in 1985?

~~~
kgwgk
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-2)

A typical configuration of a monochrome 2/120 with 4 Mb of memory, 71 Mb SCSI
disk and 20 Mb 1/4" SCSI tape cost $29,300 (1986 US price list).

A color 2/160 with 8Mb of memory, two 71 Mb SCSI disks and 60 Mb 1/4" SCSI
tape cost $48,800 (1986 US price list).

[multiply by 2.2 to convert to 2017 dollars]

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ghostbrainalpha
Man... My desktop really hasn't changed much from 2005.

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srcmap
Love to see an animated GIF version of this website.

Specially if one can capture some of cool Linux KDE GL special effects.

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rootw0rm
Damn, that SS from 1993 was a sweet system [1]. My 486-66 (DX2) from 1992 with
16 MiB of RAM, a ~340 MiB HD, and 17" sony trinitron set me back more than
$5,000.

[http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/nextstep-3.1-x86.png](http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/nextstep-3.1-x86.png)

