[linguae]

Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU). I disagree; as much as I love the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, and despite my feelings about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful, in my opinion, and this was Microsoft's most tasteful period. I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/98/2000, Office 97, and Visual Basic 6. I even liked Internet Explorer 5. These were well-made products when it came to the user interface. Yes, Windows 95 crashed a lot, but so did Macintosh System 7.

Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon.

[AnotherGoodName]

I'll also give the opinion that Apple consistently creates some absolutely crap designs and when they do this, release something really really mind mindbogglingly stupid that it should be embarrassing they are instead met with applause on the "amazing design". It's a tiresome pattern repeated for decades now.

eg. The 'breathing status light' that lit up the room at night due to extreme brightness which meant every macbook of the era had stickers or tape over the LED with endless Q&A's of "How do i turn the annoying light off? You can't!". This crap design was met by articles extolling the subtle sign wave and off white hue. I kid you not. https://avital.ca/notes/a-closer-look-at-apples-breathing-li...

Apple today seem to have acknowledged their mistake here and taken away status lights completely (also a crappy design hailed as amazing since they've just gone to the other extreme) which highlights the fact that no matter what they do they're hailed as being amazing at design, even when it's contradictory from their own previous 'amazing designs'.

Apple doesn't just get a pass on crappy design. It gets endless articles praising the virtues of everything they do even when, if you think about what they did for even a second you'd realize, "that's actually just plain crap design".

[f1shy]

> release something really really mind mindbogglingly stupid that it should be embarrassing

I’m still trying to understand who came with the idea of charging the mouse from under, instead of from a position that would allow to use the mouse while charging…

[cosmic_cheese]

I liked the gentle amber sleep mode breathing power button on my circa-2000 CRT iMac. It wasn’t nearly as bright as that of later models and was quite nice.

[wolvoleo]

Yes or the sharp edges on MacBooks cutting into your wrist. That started with the unibody design, the ones before that had a nice soft rounded plastic gasket there

My powerbook was the last apple laptop I really enjoyed.

[h2zizzle]

They're the flagship "design here, build there," company, so they got the Pollock treatment.

I'm glad people are finally saying it. Eat your heart out, Nilay.

[zelphirkalt]

I like the status lights on my old X200 a lot (on/off, battery, disk, wlan I believe, and more). It's a shame we don't have them like that any longer in Thinkpads. We only get one or two LEDs indicating on/off status. But such things need to be done right.

[gerdesj]

I recently had to get printing working for a family member on an Apple tablet. I'm not an Apple jockey so it took me a while to sort out and I've being using computers since 1980 and consulting since 1995.

You tap an icon that looks like the outline of a rectangle with an arrow pointing up. Then you tap the name of the printer. Then you tap another rectangle with an up arrow and then tap the word "Print".

I may have got the precise steps wrong but it really is that abstruse to print something on a tablet. Never mind that mDNS/Bonjour has done its thing - the steps to actually indicate that you want to print is frankly weird.

What on earth is that box with an up arrow actually supposed to mean? Why does the interface switch from icons to text?

[zzo38computer]

Status lights can be helpful, although they should be dim, and should be red or green (or possibly yellow) rather than blue or white (unless you have already used the other colours and now you need more colours).

[throwaway290]

I got no problem with that tiny LED or glowing apple logo personally

But liquid glass and insane amount of bugs that arrived with it is killing me.

[okanat]

> Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon

Ribbon also has a similar research behind it, just like Windows 95. For what they designed it, allowing beginners to discover all the functionality that's available, it works perfectly.

I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon. I also like it since it is very tastefully made for Office. 2010 was my favorite Office UI. It actually doesn't get rid of shortcuts either. Most of the Office 2003 ones were preserved to not break the workflow of power users.

Where Ribbon doesn't work is when you take out the contextual activation out of it. Most companies copied it in a very stupid way. They just copied how it looks. The way it is implemented in Sibelius, WinDBG or PDFXChange is very bad.

[derefr]

> I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon.

Well, yes, but that observation doesn't prove the point you think it does.

People who were highly experienced with previous non-ribbon versions of Office, disliked the ribbon, because the ribbon is essentially a "tutorial mode" for Office.

The ribbon reduces cognitive load on people unfamiliar with Office, by boiling down the use of Office apps to a set of primary user-stories (these becoming the app's ribbon's tabs), and then preferentially exposing the most-commonly-desired features one might want to engage with during each of these user stories, as bigger, friendlier, more self-describing buttons and dropdowns under each of these user-story tabs.

The Ribbon works great as a discovery mechanism for functionality. If an app's toplevel menu is like the index in a reference book, then an app Ribbon is like a set of Getting Started guides.

But a Ribbon does nothing to accelerate the usage of an app for people who've already come to grips with the app, and so already knew where things were in the app's top-level menu, maybe having memorized how to activate those menu items with keyboard accelerators, etc. These people don't need Getting Started guides being shoved in their face! To these people, a Ribbon is just a second index to some random subset of the features they use, that takes longer to navigate than the primary index they're already familiar with; and which, unlike the primary index, isn't organized into categories in a way that's common/systematic among other apps for the OS (and so doesn't respond to expected top-level-menu keyboard accelerators, etc, etc.)

I think apps like Photoshop have since figured out what people really want here: a UI layout ("workspace") selector, offering different UI layouts for new users ("Basic" layout) vs. experienced users ("Full" layout); and even different UI layouts for users with different high-level use-cases such that they have a known set of applicable user-stories. A Ribbon is perfect for the "Basic" layout; but in a "Full" layout, it can probably go away.

[tombert]

The thing that bothers me more than ribbon itself is how much the performance started degrading once they introduced it.

I got MS Office 97 working in Wine recently, and it's still shockingly capable. There are lots of formatting options, it can read my system TTF fonts, and it's since it's nearly thirty-year-old software, it runs ridiculously fast on modern computers.

I don't feel like MS has added many more features to Office that I actually care about, but I feel like the software has gotten progressively slower.

[BobbyTables2]

It’s also stupid in terms of screen real estate.

Earlier Word/CorelDraw/etc had a thin toolbar with lots of functionality. Barely occupied any space at just 800x600 resolution.

Nowadays, the ribbon and all other junk occupy a huge portion of the screen, even at 1920x1080.

It’s amazing how little screen area today actually shows the useful part of a document.

Instead of the Ribbon, a thin context sensitive toolbar would have been more useful.

[cosmic_cheese]

Ribbon has some good elements to it, but other elements are questionable at best. Sizing of buttons for example feels completely arbitrary and not connected to frequency of use or anything else obvious.

I think the best parts of it could be replicated by just combining tabs and traditional toolbars, but that’s not complex enough of a concept to need a dedicated moniker.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

I think the ribbon is terrible. When you are looking for something, you can't just look in one direction but you have to scan up and down. Then it may be text or just an image. And the thing you are looking for may be on some other ribbon page.

I much prefer menus with toolbars that have only the most used functions.

[omnibrain]

> 2010 was my favorite Office UI.

Mine too. Office 2010 was what made me switch back to Windows after using Linux and OpenOffice for years. I found the ribbons to be perfect for my use of Office. They usually automatically focused on the task at hand. Everything else was just a click away. Advanced stuff stayed in the menu. And, at least for me, it helped discoverability of features.

[wolpoli]

> For what they designed it, allowing beginners to discover all the functionality that's available, it works perfectly.

Sure, but where are the beginners are we talking about? In 2007, Microsoft office had long reached dominance in the workplace and school such that the only beginners are students learning word prcessing for the first time.

[jaffa2]

The ribbon doesnt work for because the options change and visibility is decided by how big my windows is.

[rkagerer]

The Ribbon is a disaster. Compared to conventional toolbars, it fails across several metrics.

When it first came out, I did studies of myself using it vs. the older toolbared versions of Word and Excel, and found I was quantifiably slower. This was after spending enough time to familiarize myself with it and get over any learning curve.

EFFICIENCY

The biggest problem is it introduced more clicks to get things done - in some cases twice as many or more. Having to "tab" to the correct ribbon pane introduces an extra click for every task that used to be one click away, unless the button happens to be on the same tab. Unfortunately the grouping wasn't as well thought out as it could have been. It was designed with a strong bias for "discoverability" over efficiency, and I found with many repetitive tasks that I commonly carried out, I was constantly having to switch back and forth between tabs. That doesn't even get into the extra clicks required for fancier elements like dropdowns, etc. And certain panes they couldn't figure out where to put are clearly "bolted" on.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

At the same time, Microsoft de-emphasized keyboard accelerators. So where the old toolbar used to hint you the keyboard shortcut in a tooltip every time you rested your mouse over a button, the new one doesn't - making it unlikely users will ever learn the powerful key combos that enable more rapid interaction and reduce RSI caused by mousing (repetitive strain injury). In my case this manifests as physical pain, so I'm very aware of wasteful gestures.

SCREEN REAL ESTATE

The amount of text in the button captions on the ribbon is also excessive. It really isn't a toolbar at all, more of a fancy dropdown menu that's been pivoted horizontally instead of vertical. It turned the menu bar, which used to be a nice, compact, single line, into something that now takes up ~4x as much vertical screen real estate. As most users' monitors are in landscape orientation, vertical space is scare to start with; congratulations you just wasted more of those precious pixels, robbing me of space to look at what I really care about which is the document or whatever thing I'm actually working on.

DISCOVERABILITY

You used to be able to get a good sense of most software's major functionality by strolling through all the menu options. Mastery (or at least proficiency) was straightforward. With the more dynamic paradigm Microsoft adopted along with the Ribbon, there's lots of functionality you don't even see until you're in a new situation (or that's hidden to the responsive window layout, which is ironic - instead of making the thing more compact, they made portions of it disappear if your window is too small). I grant some may argue this has benefits for not appearing as overwhelming to new users (although personally I've always found clean, uniform, well thought out menus to be less jarring than the scattered and more artistically inclined ribbon). But easing the learning curve had the trade off of making those users perceptually stuck in "beginner" mode. They can't customize the ribbon as meaningfully (I used to always tailor the toolbar by removing all the icons I already knew the keyboard shortcuts for, adding some buttons that were missing like Strikethrough, and move it to the same row as the menu bar to maximize clientarea space)

In my case, after trying out the new versions for a year, I made an intentional decision to go back to the 2003 versions of Word and Excel, and never look back (forward?). They are my daily drivers. These days, I barely touch modern versions of Word and Excel, except for the very rare instance I actually need a specific new feature (i.e. a spreadsheet with more than 65k rows). If someone asks me to use the new version, I simply refuse (which has never been a showstopper - my work quality is preeminent, and once you get past policy bureaucracy it turns out clients/employers don't care what tool I use to get it done).

The whole point of a toolbar was always to be a place you could pin commands you want instant access to, just a click away. The ribbon shredded that paradigm, and in my opinion took us a marked step backward in computing. It fails across several metrics, compared to regular toolbars. I wanted to blog about it at the time in hopes of convincing the world it was a mistake, but didn't have the free time. 20 years later, I'm curious if more people share these sentiments and acknowledge its shortcomings.

[h2zizzle]

I don't buy it. My generation used pre-Ribbon Office, from elementary school onward, just fine. It wasn't made for children; it was made for Boomers who couldn't grok the menu-based interface. Not old people; prime workforce-aged Boomers who were intimidated by computers, but who were being dragged kicking-and-screaming into the Information Age by their jobs. It was just another example of the infantilization of interfaces provided to that generation whenever they whined about not wanting to learn, or being scared by, something new. Everyone else just got dragged along with them.

[bediger4000]

allowing beginners to discover all the functionality

How many beginners were there in 2007? Hardly any, PC and "Word" penetration was pretty close to 100%. We are still stuck with "beginners have to figure this out" interfaces in 2026.

[bartread]

I think the interesting larger observation here is the perhaps both Microsoft and Apple peaked in their usability design between the mid-90s and late-aughts (I think Apple stayed at their peak for longer, particularly when you start thinking about the iPhone which, at the time, was streets ahead of what any other company was offering), and have both been on a down trend ever since.

Why is that though? Why does that appear to have to be the case given that neither seems anble to do annything but get worse nowadays? And why hasn’t any other player managed to step in and fill that void?

Clearly there are some broader forces and trends at play here.

Is it pressure to monetize in ever more intrusive, user-hostile, and “micro-tiresome” ways? Is it that they don’t really have to compete any more, or at least not with eachother?

What is going on here? I don’t understand. But I wish I did because then a way out might be easier to discern. Because - I still don’t think - Linux on the desktop (taking one aspect of the problem) is still necessarily ready to be the answer - certainly not outside of the technology, engineering, and scientific niches.

[h2zizzle]

I think there's something to be said for the loss of institutional knowledge, as that was the time when the first set of Baby Boomers would have been transitioning out of operational roles or the workforce altogether. My experience as a Millennial is that they and older Gen-X, as a cohort, have been quite jealous of their accumulated expertise and generally reticent to pass it along, especially when they'd learned to keep every edge possible in the hyper-competitive job markets of the 80s and 90s. It's possible that a lot of knowledge just disappeared, leaving the younger generations to reinvent the wheel at a cuil over the circumstances that brought about the UX they'd grown up with.

[beloch]

People need to go back and use Win 3.1 or MacOS 7.x to realize what a leap forward Win95 was. MacOS 7.x didn't even have preemptive multitasking! The start menu and task bar made their debut and immediately anchored the whole UI. Since then, Windows has made incremental advances (with the occasional step backwards), but no change has been nearly so radical. OS X would not have been possible without the influence of win95. We're still living in the Win95 age.

[cosmic_cheese]

OS X inherited its multitasking model from NeXTSTEP, which predates Win95 by several years.

[zzo38computer]

I have used both Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Windows 95 does have some significant benefits (e.g. you can start Windows programs from the DOS prompt (I seem to remember that you cannot do this in Windows 3.1 and in Windows 95 you can, but I am not sure if I remember correctly), and the WIN+R shortcut, and some others), but also many problems (although some can be avoided by changing stuff in the registry; I had done that to force it to display the file name extensions for all file names, rather than hiding them even if you tell it to display them; I also dislike their decision to use spaces in file names).

[LtWorf]

You have to use windows 95 with a computer from 1995 to realise how painfully slow it was compared to windows 3.

[ChuckMcM]

I think Steve was correct in that Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000 was functional but it wasn't particularly elegant. But the part I think Steve missed was that elegance may get the "ohhs and ahhs" but functionality gets the customers. Back when NeXT was a thing a friend of mine who worked there and I (working at Sun) were having the Workstation UX argument^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hdiscussion. At the time, one component was how there was always like 4 or 5 ways to do the same thing on Windows, and that was alleged to be "confusing and a waste of resources." And the counter argument was that different people would find the ways that work best for them, and having a combinatorial way of doing things meant that there was a probably a way that worked for more people.

The difference for me was "taste" was the goal, look good or get things done. For me getting things done won every time.

[jimbokun]

Jobs did understand that. In the same quote he says Microsoft earned their success.

[qalmakka]

This. Windows 9x-2000 GUIs were probably the pinnacle of OS UX, but were utterly ugly and boring as UIs. Their looks were unimpressive and boring, but they got the job done and they were easy to use and worked well. Windows 95 was like a 90 cents spoon - not particularly appealing, but extremely useful

[lateforwork]

> 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful

Only because they copied NeXTSTEP. Those 3D beveled controls originated in NeXTSTSP. In Windows, ctl3d.dll added raised and sunken 3D-looking buttons, beveled text boxes, group boxes with depth, a light-source illusion using highlight and shadow, all copied from NeXTSTEP.

[DaiPlusPlus]

That’s an odd way to spell Motif.

[kettlecorn]

Microsoft has for short periods in its history put out good UX and design, but fundamentally the company doesn't defend taste and design.

The company treats good design almost like a marketing expense only worth doing if it creates short term brand perception changes. Throughout its history it's had moments of great design when a particular leader creates a culture that promotes it, but inevitably someone higher up rotates out that leader and the culture resets.

That has been the pattern with Windows, Zune / Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, and many other consumer facing products.

[PunchyHamster]

I think there is distinction there between look and functionality.

They were functionally just fine; good even compared to some modern abominations.

But the look was just plain and ugly, even compared to some alternatives at the time.

> Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon.

Yeah I just ran it with 2000-compatible look; still ugly but at least not wasting screen space

[layer8]

Windows 95 was a vast improvement in looks over 3.x. Of course tastes differ, but I found it very aesthetic, not ugly at all, and used the classic look until Windows 7 EOLd.

[opan]

I have some nostalgia for XP, especially the Zune theme (separate download, black+orange recolor of the default), but due to the Classic theme being available in so many versions and often using it either for more performance or easier ricing (can easily swap the colors and fonts via official settings), I'm also nostalgic for the Win95 or so UI. I think 2000 was the oldest I remember actually using, but I used XP a lot and 2000 not very much.

In the last decade+ of using GNU/Linux, I've also become very attached to bitmap fonts and simple solid colors, while I've grown to dislike curves and transparency. So sometimes I see a screenshot of some very old Mac OS version I never even used, and it just looks good, sharp, and clean to me, no real nostalgia involved.

I think SerenityOS's vision of a unix-like environment with classic Windows UI is genius. I don't follow the project that closely, but on paper it does seem like a good idea.

[DaiPlusPlus]

By your timeline, it means Microsoft only had institutional taste for about 3-4 years. A tiny fraction of the company’s lifetime.

(If it helps, I do agree with you about those years being the most… design-coordinated: when Office felt like part of Windows)

(I like to think that Visual Studio 2026 proves that the company can still do good desktop UI design; but it doesn’t help that every major first-party product is now using their own silo’d UI framework; wither MFC and CommonControls, I guess)

[derefr]

I think there was a period from Windows 3.1 to somewhere during Windows 98 (maybe right up until the release of Office 97?) where both first-party and third-party Windows apps were all expected to be built entirely in terms of the single built-in library of Win32 common controls; and where Windows was expected to supply common controls to suit every need.

This was mostly because we were just starting to see computers supporting large bitmapped screen resolutions at this point; but VRAM was still tiny during this period, and so drawing to off-screen buffers, and then compositing those buffers together, wasn't really a thing computers could afford to do while running at these high resolutions.

Windows GDI + COMCTL32, incl. their control drawing routines, their damage tracking for partial redraw, etc., were collectively optimized by some real x86-assembly wizards to do the absolute minimum amount of computation and blitting possible to overdraw just what had changed each frame, right onto the screen buffer.

On the other hand, what Windows didn't yet support in this era was DirectDraw — i.e. the ability of an app to reserve a part of the screen buffer to draw on itself (or to "run fullscreen" where Windows itself releases its screen-buffer entirely.) Windows apps were windowed apps; and the only way to draw into those windows was to tell Windows GDI to draw for you.

This gave developers of this era three options, if they wanted to create a graphical app or game that did something "fancy":

1. Make it a DOS app. You could do whatever you wanted, but it'd be higher-friction for Windows users (they'd have to essentially exit Windows to run your program), and you'd have to do all that UI-drawing assembly-wizardry yourself.

2. Create your own library of controls, that ultimately draw using GDI, the same way that the Windows common controls do. Or license some other vendor's library of controls. Where that vendor, out of a desire for their controls to be as widely-applicable as possible, probably designed them to blend in with the Windows common controls.

3. Give up and just use the Windows common controls. But be creative about it.

#3 is where games like Minesweeper and Chip's Challenge came from — they're both essentially just Windows built-in grid controls, where each cell contains a Windows built-in button control, where those buttons can be clicked to interact with the game, and where those buttons' image labels are then collectively updated (with icons from the program's own icon resources, I believe?) to display the new game state.

For better or worse, this period was thus when Microsoft was a tastemaker in UI design. Before this period, early Windows just looked like any other early graphical OS; and after this period, computers had become powerful enough to support redrawing arbitrary windowed UI at 60Hz through APIs like DirectDraw. It was only in this short time where compute and memory bottlenecks, plus a hard encapsulation boundary around the ability of apps to draw to the screen, forced basically every Windows app/game to "look like" a Windows app/game.

And so, necessarily, this is the period where all the best examples of what we remember as "Windows-paradigm UI design" come from.

[1970-01-01]

Steven Jobs conveniently ignored the Start menu when discussing the competition. He probably secretly admired it, as it was a complete success story for Microsoft.

https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0717344B1/en

[baq]

> Microsoft not having taste

the liquid glass designers (and probably their managers and design vps) should be repeatedly punched in the face with that video

[kmeisthax]

What's doubly-insulting about Liquid Glass is that Windows Vista did the glass thing better. Aero rivaled mid-2000s Aqua in design chops, and in some ways did a better job of showing off what GPU compositing could do. But most importantly Microsoft actually understood that text on glass needs loads of background protection, damn it.

[Telaneo]

MS may not have been as tasteful as MacOS, but the functionality was at least there and it was easy to find and use. That goes a long way to make up for the bland-ish look.

Then we lost even more taste, and eventually the functionality and user friendlyness, on both sides of the isle.

[jdswain]

The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.

[sedatk]

Exactly. Windows Cairo was planned to be a competitor to NeXTSTEP, and later, parts of it made it to Windows 95 and NT.

[jeberle]

The "no taste" quote makes no sense given that Susan Kare did the many of the significant icons in Windows 95. She did the same for the Mac.

[pjmlp]

Agreed, especially since in Europe there was hardly any Apple presence.

It is no accident that to this day Demoscene is all about Spectrum, C64, CPC, MSX, Atari, Amiga, PC and there is hardly any retrogaming/demoscene focus of Apple hardware.

Regarding Windows, I would place Windows 95, NT 4.0, 2000 and 7 as my favourite UI flavour ones.

[pcurve]

What made system 7 and 8 worse in some respect was when it crashed, it crashed hard without warning

With windows the crash was progressive so you have time to save and prepare.

I also have fond memories of windows 2000. It was rock steady and polished. I preferred it over system 8 and even OS X which had to many Unix conventions.

[cosmic_cheese]

With System 7 or Mac OS 8/8.5/9, if one used it for long enough with a stable software setup you'd eventually get a gut feel for what programs, extension sets, etc were most likely to invite a crash (it wasn't a terrible idea to reboot after a long web browsing session with Netscape for instance). It wasn't surefire, but one could get it into a somewhat stable state. You never stopped hammering ⌘S, though.

Windows 2000 was incredible. Running it after having wrestled with 98SE was like getting teleported from a garbage dump to sunny meadow with a fresh ocean breeze. I've never seen machines transform quite as radically as they did when upgrading from something earlier to 2000.

[analog31]

I once proved to my boss that a font was crashing System 7. And we always unplugged the network when we didn’t need it because a crash on one Mac could bring down every other Mac on the network.

[giantrobot]

General protection errors and BSODs say hello, also to hit CTRL + ALT + DELETE to restart.

[JustinGoldberg9]

There's an entire is that loves 90s msft user interface. SerenityOS.

[M95D]

SerenityOS was born dead. Let me explain why.

No new OS today will ever be used by any significant number of people without 1) a working web browser and 2) hardware support for laptops, phones, wifi cards... you know... stuff people already have.

SerenityOS might get a working browser. Not very likely, but it might get it. The #2 condition will only be solved if it somehow "imports" Linux drivers or wrap Windows binary drivers in a compatibility layer (like Linux used to have for wifi).

Their policy to not use any external code or libraries is what will finally kill the project. It's simply not possible for them to rewrite any significant portion of drivers needed. Not even Linux can keep up and they have lots of contributors from the hardware industry.

They could probably make SerenityOS a VM-only OS. That could work. Run Linux as a HAL and SerenityOS as a UI on top. But then, why not write a complete Linux userspace to replace Gnu?

[glenstein]

Amazing you say that because I almost posted that comment in response to that same clip in another HN thread, for the same reason. There's a tight integration between style, performance, and design on the Windows 95 and 98 that then now feels more like "true" Windows than anything since.

I think Jobs was right about Microsoft later on, but they certainly had taste during their peak.

[reddalo]

Performance started going downhill with Windows XP, and then even more with Windows Vista.

Modern Windows doesn't feel snappy anymore, even thought we have the most powerful computers we've ever had.

Sometimes I use some old Win32 apps, and they feel so responsive and light...

[frizlab]

But did you use 95 when you were young? I was using primarily MacOS at the time and always found windows particularly bad at everything, including UI/UX. I guess we like what we know…

[moron4hire]

I'm a huge fan of the book "Design for the Real World" by Victor Papanek. One of the things that he talked about is the importance of using materials honestly: not trying to pass plastic off as wood, using the given material to it's best ability (even if itis plastic).

I've always thought the Windows 3.1 to Win2K era were exactly that. The medium is pixels on a screen, the mouse and keyboard. And there is no artifice, it's just the bare essentials.

[throwawaytea]

I have good news for you. Even a Linux Mint Mate would make you happy again, let alone some of the windows 95 look alikes.

[panzi]

2000 was peak except for them still having those tiny non-resizeable dialogs with long lists in them which you have to scroll horizontally and vertically. WTF? Your typical Linux DE was better at that even back then.

[lstodd]

I generally agree, only that XP was okay in my opinion after one disabled all fluff so that it looked like 98SE.

It's no wonder XFCE and to lesser extent Mate are popular, XFCE4 does a nice job of being a handy tool and not in-your-face design manifest.

[jgalt212]

> Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon

What a waste screen real estate, IMO. The only reason it's still around is because screens are now 2X bigger, and screen real estate has become cheaper.

[nextstepfan]

Windows 95 is a rip-off of NeXTStep