[karhuton]

Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.

It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.

Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.

The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.

I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.

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Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:

These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.

[sedatk]

I agree. That was the only unfair assessment in the article, IMHO. Windows 2 was based on the Presentation Manager standard which was developed by IBM and Microsoft, and also used with OS/2, and more importantly, CDE + Motif. That's why many Unix desktops used to look like 3D Microsoft Windows desktops back then. Because they all were based on the same GUI standard.

[Narishma]

You're talking about Windows 3. Windows 2 predates Presentation Manager.

[M95D]

I really liked the fact they had full menu bars on resolutions far lower than phones had 15 years ago. No hamburger menus.