GUI nostalgia draws me back to ...
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GUI? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm still using the command line!
Re:GUI? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still using the command line!
Well yes, but the purpose of a GUI is to give you multiple command line interfaces. I think GUIs do other things, but I have yet to find them essential.
Re:GUI? (Score:5, Insightful)
What does tmux have to do with GUIs? :)
Re: (Score:3)
Well, I have to admit that I find it rather difficult to watch video when it's being ascii-fied.
Re: (Score:3)
Who needs a GUI for multiple CLIs when you have Screen [gnu.org]...
Re:GUI? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:GUI? (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot user, hates using GUI's - needs most powerful video cards on the market to drive his GUI based array of terminal emulators.
I miss you guys sometimes.
Re:GUI? (Score:5, Insightful)
WPS (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
The WPS from OS/2 v2+. Sadly missed both for power and customizability. On a T5200 with a whole 14 MB of RAM in the early 1990s, I was running NFS server+client, X applications, PM applications, and Windows applications side-by-side on the OS/2 desktop plus both XFree86 and Windows fullscreen sessions.
This, though I also enjoyed Desqview X when I was booting DOS. It is being surpassed recently with the GUI's of Windows 7 and MacOS but it was so far ahead of the curve. It's a pity IBM all but killed it, though one can still enjoy the love with Ecomstation.
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GUI? I still use a keyloader (Score:3, Funny)
Ha!
Command lines are for sissies!
I still directly access the chip registers from a keypad!
And read the output from an LED ribbon strip!
Re: (Score:3)
Can't handle toggle switches and front-panel lights, eh?
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TUI ! (Score:5, Insightful)
These were the days...
--Coder
Command Line = GUI just ask Claude Shannon (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm still using the command line!
I'll take this one to my grave, y'all...
CLI=GUI
The Command Line Interface is, by any consistent definition, a user interface that is graphical (visual) in nature. One is text only (CLI), the other is text and polygon based (GUI)...sounds, etc can be factored in...
The difference is Shannon Entropy [wikipedia.org]...or uncertainty...
Windows 3.x vs DOS
In a text-only environment, there are less possible combinations of symbols, therefore there is less entropy, less information, or a narrower bandwidth (Shannon-Weaver model [wikipedia.org]) depending on how you like to look at things. The command line can only return so many different combinations of alpha-numeric and the Windows 3.x environment is limited by how fast the processor can count.
In the Windows 3.x environment, the ammount of information or the bandwidth is greater by several orders of magnitude.
It is precisely **because** CLI has less uncertainty that coders and developers prefer it as their choice of GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE.
Respondents, please, if you disagree with my contention, explain how we can falsify the concept of 'graphical user interface'....what is an example of a non-graphical user interface? A system where the feedback is not visual, but yet it is still human/system interaction.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
what is an example of a non-graphical user interface? A system where the feedback is not visual, but yet it is still human/system interaction.
iOS with VoiceOver turned on, used by a blind person
Re: (Score:3)
command lines are icky you should all convert to MS Bob
(maniacal laughter fallowed by manic giggling)
Wolfenstein 3D's menu (Score:5, Insightful)
And other similar game menus :)
Re:Wolfenstein 3D's menu (Score:5, Insightful)
And of course the text "Get Psyched!" while the level was loading and the floppy went "tchuck tchuck tchuck".
Nostalgia? Metro, Unity and Gnome 3 are nightmares (Score:4, Informative)
GNOME 2.32.0
Using it right now. Call me old fashioned, but I like a GUI that you can actually use, and even customize.
Re:Nostalgia? Metro, Unity and Gnome 3 are nightma (Score:5, Insightful)
This is getting a bit ridiculous. Some people are starting to use any excuse to bash Unity/Gnome3 whatever.
Re:Nostalgia? Metro, Unity and Gnome 3 are nightma (Score:4, Insightful)
They give us plenty of options for bashing. No reason to find "any excuse".
Re:Nostalgia? Metro, Unity and Gnome 3 are nightma (Score:5, Funny)
For any serious bashing, there is always /bin/bash.
They are nightmares though. (Score:2)
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LCARS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, you can't make an LCARS interface commercially because it is copyrighted by Paramount. DMCAs have been used to take down apps that look like one at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:LCARS (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't have to be for sale to get taken down by a DMCA order, just available to the public. Anyone who's started working on one gets shut down, so nobody's ever finished anything decent.
As interfaces go though, it's very bulky - the menus and such take up far too much space on screen, meaning that though it's great for watching someone else using it on a TV screen, since you can see that they're doing stuff, it's not very efficient for actual use.
Re:LCARS (Score:5, Insightful)
comfortable, cheap, machine washable, don't need ironed, and readily available.
See, that's the problem with LCARS - it's not cheap (Paramount ownership issues, license would have to be paid before it could be distributed), it's not readily available (nobody's paid for the license, so they always get shut down via DMCA), and it's not actually comfortable (which is why UI experts regard it as a poor UI). The largest problem is the massive waste of available space for those giant thick menu bars to the sides that don't go away. The main advantage of LCARS is it's distance-visibility, meaning that you can see it over the shoulder of someone in the background on a TV screen, and see that they're doing something.
Sadly, what makes a good "TV show computer interface" and what makes a good real computer interface are totally separate qualifications. The best example of this that I can think of would be the movie "Hackers" - seriously, nobody who is doing any kind of systems work or programming has a screen that looks like that, but if they'd used what those screens would really look like, nobody would have found it interesting to watch.
Re: (Score:3)
Window Maker (Score:5, Insightful)
Coming from tvtwm and fvwm, Window Maker [windowmaker.org] was extremely beautiful and powerful. Although Gnome 2.x replaced it on all my workstations, I still fondly remember my Window Maker days.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I had a similar progression. fvwm to Window Maker -- still use WM when I boot into BSD.
Re:Window Maker (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
I use Window Maker 0.92 and Gnome 2.30.2.
Window Maker just replaces Gnome's window manager "metacity". Root window, Nautilus, Gnome panel, Workspace Switcher etc. from Gnome just work.
FVWM (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Wow! I never realized how popular is actually was. From the Wiki article: "At its peak, GEOS was the third most popular operating system in the world in terms of units shipped, trailing only MS-DOS and Mac OS."
I always felt like I was the only one in my neighborhood who owned it.
KDE3 (Score:5, Insightful)
It was nearly perfect, my favourite feature was the abillity to grab the border of a full-screen window and _slightly_ resize it. I simply do not understand why all other WMs i've seen treat a full-screen window differently compared to non-full screen windows _happening_ to cover the entire screen. Oh, and the on-top and on-all-desktops buttons! No idea if KDE4 has these features as well since it's too much of a hog for my "relic" 5 year old hardware.
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Fully agree. In KDE4, they did not reimplement tons of those little things that made KDE3.5 work so great and useful, and only went for features instead...
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The Trinity project is a fork that maintains KDE3... Google "kde3 trinity" and click the first link
RISC OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who went to school in the UK in the 1980s grew up on it.
Re:RISC OS (Score:4, Informative)
You beat me to it, although an 80's kid (such as me) would mostly be using BBC Model Bs and Master 128s which didn't really have a GUI (until the Compact). Archimedes was only launched in 87 and took a while to get into the schools. I was hacking on them between school and university (87-88) and wrote my first few papers on my trusty A310, before "upgrading" to an evil Elonex PC with a 33Mhz 486. For the love of god, why did I do that?
Re:RISC OS (Score:5, Informative)
Ah yes, those were the days...
It had (has) some fun features
Er... hang on... this is all sounding a bit like Mac OS... :-)
...to be fair, NeXTStep, a.k.a. Max OS IX 9.0 'Fluffy Kitten' was around at about the same time, RISC OS was Nothing like OSX/Unix under the hood, more like the BBC Micro OS on steroids with an API GUI that anybody who had programmed GEM would find strangely familiar...
Plus, you could write full-blown GUI apps in BBC Basic - and many did - although it couls be misleading because BBC BASIC could include ARM Assembler.
Also came bundled with a brilliant vector art package called !Draw.
Re: (Score:3)
Reposting because I forgot I wasn't logged in. Oops!
Absolutely; it was way ahead of just about anything else. So easy to program, both in BASIC and ARM Assembler although I did most of my GUI programming in C using Desklib. The drag and drop loading and saving was such genius as well. And remember the memory allocation sliders? Not ideal but more control than most OSes provided.
Back in 1992 I was at university and had an idea to write a remote-control and scripting app; ordinary apps would register APIs and
Re:RISC OS (Score:5, Funny)
Never mind schools. I was using and coding (ANSI C) on RiscOS (Archimedes) for the Royal Air Froce Aptitude Testing System.
I see the Air Froce had high standards.
DeskMate (Score:3)
DeskMate on my Tandy 1000 SX.
No one said it had to be a good GUI, just nostalgic :-)
GEM (Score:5, Insightful)
On my Atari ST, GEM was amazing. Maybe not the fanciest system in the world, but I always thought it was pretty sweet for the time.
Re: (Score:2)
The ST came with as much as 4M and the 680x0 line could handle much more than that. Later iterations of Atari hardware had a much more sane "extended memory" setup than DOS.
GEM (Score:5, Informative)
The one on the Atari ST, not the crippled one sold to PC owners when Digital Research lost to Apple in court.
Re: (Score:2)
where's the upvote
Minority Report. (Score:2)
GUI nostalgia draws me back to ... the interface used in _Minority Report_.
A silly movie, in the end, but a visually cool computer interface.
Or, wait, does nostalgia for fictional interfaces count? I won't even mention _Lawnmower Man_.
Re: (Score:3)
interesting note, Minority report was the sequel to Total Recall.
Re:HAL 9000 [Re:Minority Report.] (Score:4, Insightful)
Wasn't that distribution withdrawn because the OS turned out to have fatal errors?
The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. They are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.
WXP (Score:2)
I am becoming nostalgic for Windows XP. In my day job I use a Windows XP desktop which has access to terminal servers running Windows 2008 and a VM running Windows 7. I use 2008 and Win7 so I can support users on them, but when I want to get stuff done, I minimize them and use the XP UI. I don't expect this to change when Win8 goes into production.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. The eye candy of Vista and 7 don't do much for me, I like the clean colorful look of XP.
OS2 (Score:2, Interesting)
OS2 never gets any love. It was on the first PC my family bought. And then we got rid of it and installed IBM DOS 5 like everyone else. But even still. OS2. What a ride.
Re: (Score:2)
+1
OS/2 v3 and the PM were great.
GEOS! (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system) [wikipedia.org]
I actually had a 386 (4Mhz maybe, 40MB HD) that ran GEOS.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. I remember using GEOS on my C-64 back in College. I had a 300 baud modem attached, and was able to download a "GEOS Programming Guide" text file from Quantum Link. It took several hours to download, and when I printed all 70+ pages on my Star Micronics dot-matrix printer.
Those were the days of patience!
GEOS was later incorporated into the Casio Zoomer/ZPDA, a handheld PDA that came out about the same time as the original Apple Message Pad. It was the precursor to the Palm Pilot.
Re: (Score:2)
I recently stumbled upon (and threw out) my GEOS manuals. I had the C128 version.
The nostalgia was a great feeling, flipping through the manuals before I put them in the recyling bin. I used to write all my school reports on it. Too bad the rest of the system went in the trash years ago after the C128's VDC burned out for a second time.
OS/2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Surprised no one has mentioned the Warp yet...
Re:OS/2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Surprised no one has mentioned the Warp yet...
Workplace Shell written in 'C' with SOM.
It has/had a lot of wonderful features and had a small footprint. SOM was UGLY. First you had to write an IDL, precompile that to get your 'C' headers and stub code, then write your functionality and then compile that, and the register the SOM object with the Workplace Shell. Cumbersome but yet you knew what was happening under the hood.
When you compiled OS/2 Warp for Windows with debug off, it was able to boot and run with just 4MB of RAM with very little thrashing of the hard drive.
Unfortunately, IBM NEVER marketed OS/2 for Windows as a stand alone release - you did NOT need Windows to install and run the thing. Also, MS had a tendency of releasing fixes to Windows that would break OS/2 for Windows - there were some hard coded hooks into Windows that had a tendency to move when MS added code.
Warp had some other issues because of the legacy of OS/2 1.x - OS/2 Warp (x86) was a recompile of OS/2 1.3 (and some code tweaking ) with Visual Age C++ 32 bit. OS/2 Power PC OTOH, was a rewrite of the kernel only and the shell and other programs that run on top were ported to the "Power OS/2" as we called it in Boca.
It's funny, at the time, I was going through some shitty times down there, but I had some wonderful friends and it was nice on occasion to grab a burger and sit on the beach to unwind from the BS at IBM. It's all gone now and maybe that's a good thing. Gerstner did the right thing but it didn't seem like it at the time.
When I die I won't say "Rosebud" - I'll say "Warp".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Surprised no one has mentioned the Warp yet...
Only because you got here first!
Moved to Warp after getting fed up with Windows 3.0 and 3.1. Loved the clean, intuitive interface. Laughed at Microsoft's "cheap imitation" that wouldn't die as it flailed from Windows 95 to 98 to 98 SE to NT 4.0. I think NT 4.0 (later releases) was when Microsoft actually achieved the same level of stability as Warp 2.1 but with a footprint that was huge compared to Warp.
I finally said a sad good bye to Warp as IBM support for consumers running it basically disappeared ar
Re: (Score:3)
I'm an OS/2 certified engineer. Still have the card to prove it.
The GUI did have its bumps. Like how you could turn the entire backing screen into a window (It was just a maximized window) and crash the OS by dragging a color to the thing behind it. IBM said it's because you were dragging an object to something that was NULL, and that was working as designed. Getting your (binary) ini files corrupted and having to reinstall all your desktop objec
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Compared with the available OSes which could do multitasking and still installable at home, it was one of the best OSes around at that time. It beat the pants of the Windows crowd easily. I used to run BBSes on OS/2, even when I was abusing the system running CAD software for my Uni work, my users could still download their files w/o a single CRC error. Windows couldn't even handle two users in one go comfortably. Desqview was the way to go for those but then you couldn't run the CAD stuff.
I don't know about you guys... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
...but my first GUI was Rogue.
What, no love for castle.exe [thealmightyguru.com]?
Tandy Deskmate (Score:2)
Nostalgia? (Score:2)
There is no option for those who find modern OS GUIs superior.
Re: (Score:2)
It was a question about Nostalgia. Remembering back in the day. (You kids get off my lawn!, etc)
Anyone who mentions a GUI from the 1990's or later doesn't know what Nostalgia is.
DOSSHELL.EXE (Score:5, Informative)
Does DOSSHELL count as a GUI? If so, that was the first one that I ever used, back when I had my first computer and was still learning the command line via trial and error. The computer was a 386 (DX, not SX!) and had a Turbo button that bumped it up from 16MHz to a blistering 25MHz. As far as I can tell, the only point of said button was to slow down old games so that they wouldn't run so fast that you couldn't see them. (Yes, the speed that a lot of games ran at depended on how fast your computer was.) Ah, those were the days.
Re: (Score:2)
I used to sort my games in different ways using Dos Shell forever. By company, by genre, by release date... but I always ended up with just a big list sorted alphabetically.
GEM (Score:2)
Punched cards (Score:4, Funny)
Xerox Star (Score:3)
Later on, I was amused to see the first Macintosh system, which looked like such a ripoff of the Xerox GUI. It was, of course.
OLVWM (Score:2)
See here [xwinman.org]. SunOS goodness. First Sun workstation I ever used. 'nuff said.
(And fluxbox still rules them all on Linux and OpenBSD.)
twm (Score:4, Interesting)
I still run twm (Score:3)
I still run twm. Every few years, I'll try something else, but it seems that every window manager I've found insists on controlling things that twm lets you configure. I want control over every pixel on the screen. I want control over all keyboard and mouse functions in the root window. With twm, I get that.
One thing twm doesn't have is any sort of dynamic configuration. I wanted my .twmrc to be the same file on all my systems, but to be dynamically configured for the local system. To do this, I made
Am I the only one that remembers the LISA? (Score:3)
WEBOS ! (Score:3)
BeOS Here (Score:4)
Re:BeOS Here (Score:4)
Fast as hell, too. GUI remained smooth even when browsing the web and playing a video (Win98 and Linux didn't, even on at-the-time beefy hardware) and loading a web page never, ever made an MP3 stutter. No window tearing like in Windows (a bit) and Linux/Xfree86 (CONSTANTLY).
Whatever BeOS had, modern operating systems need more of it.
Re: (Score:3)
BeOS was fast because most (all?) widgets executed in a system process, not in the client processes. The GUI did not have to send events to the application who had to go through its widget hierarchy and collect drawing commands to send.
Windows has less tearing than X mostly because it does not allow you to move windows whenever you want to. Windows has to ask the app first, while on X, the title bar is owned by the window manager.
MacOS X and recent versions of Windows are able to avoid tearing by giving eve
Older Mac OS (Score:4, Interesting)
Mac OS X is cool and all, but Apple gave up a lot of their HIG principles along the way. Here are two that spring to mind:
File access through a stateful UI. Used to be that a folder opened to show a window. Specifically, each folder always opened its same window. If you already had it opened somewhere else, it would close there and reopen here, with the same display mode & icon arrangement.
Menu items that were verbs. Used to be that every item in the menu bar was a verb. "File" (as in "filing"), "Edit", "Format", all the rest. The principle here was that there are many fewer verbs than objects, but each one has a large scope of action, so it makes sense to use them for top-level classification.
Enlightenment (Score:3)
E was amazing at its time, and later on very ambitious. Never really went anywhere, but for me it was the point where I realized that GUIs do not have to be bland, boring and ugly. Also, not rectangular.
Obivious missing option: Enlightenment (Score:3)
Back in '99 I saw screenshots of Enlightenment. Right then and there I knew FOSS was going to win. Not tomorrow, not neccesarily in 10 years, but it would win. ... Or at least rule in critical environments. Strange that I noticed that by seeing a *screenshot* of a piece of FOSS software, and not by using it.
But that's no suprise, because in terms of innovation E was 10 years ahead of everything else. And still is in some parts.
Re: (Score:3)
"Yep kids you had to park your drive heads every time you powered off."
Um... no we didn't.
Re: (Score:2)
Windows 3 wasn't impressive for anyone who had every used a home computer. Every single one of them (Mac, Atari, Amiga, whatever) blew Windows away by the late 80s.
You couldn't run Windows 3.1 properly on a 286 by the way, as you needed at least a 386 in order to activate "enhanced mode" and actually make it do something.
Re: (Score:2)
In some ways, computers still have not become quite as appliance like as Lisa. Only now are modern OSes (eg, Android, iOS, etc) starting to do so.
Re: (Score:2)
A good CLI is what you fall back on when some clueless kids with something to prove completely scrambles and knarfles everyone's GUI.
Re: (Score:2)
I was never too happy about my experiences with CDE but I'm still nostalgic for another Motif-based window manager, 4dwm.
For its time it was a perfectly fine window manager but I can't say that it aged well...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The GUI being those strange graphics printed on the membrane keyboard?
Re:Mac OS 5-OS9 (Score:4, Insightful)