Thanks for the nostalgia trip. That's a very special era to me personally, and shaped my entire life and career since then.
I'm a very nostalgic person in general (due to health issues now making me face mortality etc) and I think the late 90s online scene was the most incredible "scenes" I've ever experienced. Everyone was a hacker, and everything was customised and modified and tweaked to within an inch of its life. These days it's a mission to even theme your OS to how you want it, but in those days running anything "stock" was almost a crime.
It's a real shame to look at where our interfaces with technology went. From the modern web to modern OS design to modern app design, it's all just so illogical and... shallow? Like a celebrity's fake face and smile. I'm not sure what the word is.
Linux seems to be one of the last places where you can find efficient and intelligent design (most of the time :P), and an encouragement to customise and modify to your liking.
I could not disagree more with your third paragraph. Many of these old UIs were esoteric to the point of being nearly unusable. The art and science of UI design has rapidly evolved since those days. The purpose of the UI layer is not to serve as a medium for self expression of its creator. Itβs purpose is to create an intuitive link between the user and the data or system beneath it. Modern UI design has done a much better job of making this link more intuitive and transparent.
Yeh I was kind of broad with that statement due to tiredness. I was specifically thinking of Windows 10 vs Windows 98, examples like that. It's not just Windows either, but so many websites go for this "huge whitespace, zero content" style too. Just trying to find the address or contact details for a restaurant can be a frustrating experience these days.
But yes, that era did have a lot of over-design as well, and we've studied and progressed UI/UX in a lot of truly awesome ways in recent times. I just wish we'd get past this "minimal" crap.
In the 80s with the "democratization" of technology we all dreamed of a future where all the population would become tech-savvy, instead we dumbed down devices and their interfaces and now everything looks like is made by hasbro and automated to the point that users don't even need to know what they really want to do.
I'm a very nostalgic person in general (due to health issues now making me face mortality etc) and I think the late 90s online scene was the most incredible "scenes" I've ever experienced. Everyone was a hacker, and everything was customised and modified and tweaked to within an inch of its life. These days it's a mission to even theme your OS to how you want it, but in those days running anything "stock" was almost a crime.
It's a real shame to look at where our interfaces with technology went. From the modern web to modern OS design to modern app design, it's all just so illogical and... shallow? Like a celebrity's fake face and smile. I'm not sure what the word is.
Linux seems to be one of the last places where you can find efficient and intelligent design (most of the time :P), and an encouragement to customise and modify to your liking.