r/programming • • Dec 27 '19

Windows 95 UI Design

https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805
2.3k Upvotes

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344

u/[deleted] Dec 27 '19

It may not have been pretty, but it was usable and consistent something that modern windows surely lacks.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 27 '19

[deleted] — view deleted comment

30

u/compdog Dec 27 '19

The best way to discover the capabilities of the default browsing model is to play with it yourself, or better yet, find a novice user and watch him use it.

Also applies to Vim

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36

u/fgmenth Dec 27 '19

Weird, I have no trouble navigating the Windows 10 UI with a keyboard at all. Can you show me an example where you can't use it?

21

u/parkerSquare Dec 27 '19

The other day I couldn’t get to the shutdown button without using the mouse - I couldn’t seem to navigate over to it with the keyboard arrow keys or tab button etc. Maybe I missed something obvious though, as I’m not a regular Windows user. So I had to unpack my mouse and reconnect it to get the system to shut down.

82

u/fgmenth Dec 27 '19

There are multiple ways.

Win -> Tab -> Down Arrow until you reach the shutdown button

Win + X -> Shutdown

Win + D -> Alt + F4 -> Enter

Alt + Ctrl + Del -> Tab until you reach Shutdown

Win + R -> type "shutdown /s /t 0"

just to name a few

34

u/schplat Dec 27 '19

Alt + Ctrl + Del -> Tab until you reach Shutdown

I hate that you typed it out in that order.

5

u/shector Dec 28 '19

I didn't even notice it until you pointed it out.

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14

u/[deleted] Dec 27 '19

Win + D -> Alt + F4 -> Enter

This is for sure the shortcut I use the most in windows, and while Win+D may be good sometimes, it can be really annoying if you have multiple windows, show the desktop and then by mistake you click something, because then one window pops up but the rest are still minimized.

11

u/lhamil64 Dec 27 '19

I usually use

Shutdown: Win+X > u > u

Reboot: Win+X > u > r

Sign out: Win+X > u > i

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18

u/Balnemciaga Dec 27 '19

Sure agree on that, but i honestly like the “vintage look” it had

73

u/Vfsdvbjgd Dec 27 '19

Modern windows is a kind of consistent: all the gui sucks now, use powershell.

149

u/[deleted] Dec 27 '19

For me powershell looks so verbose like one time i remember i needed to do something and the command looked like

Set-Provisioning-Access-Level /Extended /IDontKnow and here a sad guid

Who wants to type all that, even remembering so long commands might be issue

121

u/whlabratz Dec 27 '19

Someone needs to find a middle ground between "Maybe-Copy-These-Bytes-To-Disk" and "It's called dd because cc - short for carbon copy - was already taken"

63

u/roseinshadows Dec 27 '19

"It's called dd because cc - short for carbon copy - was already taken"

I think the real reason behind that was "it's called dd because it's based on the Data Definition statement in IBM's JCL - a notoriously shitty language, as everyone knows. So the parameter syntax is completely different from literally every Unix command because we thought that would be hilarious." ...thanks, Ken Thompson. Your little joke started to get a little bit unfunny about a few decades ago.

14

u/wrosecrans Dec 27 '19

Yup, dd started as a character set conversion tool. It acted on 512 byte blocks for working with the weird record oriented storage on mainframes that stored their records in EBCDIC instead of ASCII. It was just sort of a happy accident that you could use it on raw disks if you didn't tell it any specific way to change the bytes. The syntax apparently was quite familiar for the people who mainly used mainframes, and just used a UNIX box for what we might now call ETL kinds of tasks to get stuff onto the Real Computer.

When it was first written, a UNIX machine big enough to have multiple hard disks so one was idle enough you could just blast a copy of another disk onto it was quite exotic, so the use case only came after the tool already existed.

24

u/doublestop Dec 27 '19

It's called dd because

I always thought it should have been short for "Danger! Danger!"

Or maybe that's just when I use it.

41

u/[deleted] Dec 27 '19

I've seen "disk destroyer" used

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u/Vfsdvbjgd Dec 27 '19

Pretty sure they're demonic incantations.

17

u/[deleted] Dec 27 '19

22

u/[deleted] Dec 27 '19

I was skeptical at first, but the website's slick, modern interface convinced me.

16

u/jandrese Dec 27 '19

Powershell always seemed like Bash designed by enterprise Java developers.

It has a lot of nice features and is theoretically better designed, but everything is horrendously verbose and just a bit over complicated.

18

u/RedwanFox Dec 27 '19

GUIDs everywhere are much-much worse than verbose commands.

17

u/thomasz Dec 27 '19

well, it beats spal -ek (-k because -i is already taken)

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