Those screenshots are just so beautiful.

They look hideous to me. The composition of colors and irritating fonts is just so over the top and distracting.

This was long before proper scaling fonts and pretty much all the windowing systems across Unices, OS/2 and other niche windowing systems for the PC all looked like this.

Back then it looked like the future compared to a green screen or a DOS application

As long as you'd never seen a Macintosh or Amiga

Macintosh were still black and white at the time, and really expensive, more so than PCs, a tradition that never changed.

Amiga yes, but it got the fame of only being good for people doing games, thus it had a hard time getting adoption on business offices.

Windows 2 came out in December 1987. The Macintosh II (which introduced "full" palettized 8-bit color) had already come out in March 1987.

While I stand corrected on the year being the same, there is the question of the price, which offered a 16 bit VGA, not 8 bit colour palette, at more affordable price point.

16-color VGA, not 16 bits (which would be 65536 colors).

And you could buy a decent car for the price of the Mac II. Base model was twice the cost of a well specced PC/AT at the time.

In terms of price it was in the same league as Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations, not the PC.

Amiga Workbench had a comically bad interface, though?

I don't see why it would be called "comically bad" compared to its contemporaries. The 1.x series was a bit spartan, sure. But the UI itself afforded several unique features that weren't found anywhere else. The ability to have multiple "screens" or viewports with independent resolutions and color depths and drag them down to navigate between them seamlessly was quite useful, as was the ability to move windows on top/bottom of the stack without focusing the window (which is largely a forgotten paradigm, outside of forced "always on top" windows which is just a bandage over the lack of decoupled focus and window depth). AmigaOS certainly got better for the most part with the 2.x and 3.x series. Commodore's mismanagement is largely what did the Amiga in, not any technical aspects.

I was talking about the looks of the version 1. Technical side of things seems quite solid, and things have clearly improved by 2.x.

I only became an Amiga owner in the 21st century, when it was all over bar the shouting, but friends owned them at the time and loved them. (I had an Acorn Archimedes with RISC OS 2.)

As I understand it, the weird colours of AmigaDOS 1.x (blue, white, black and orange) were chosen to deliver usable contrast on an analogue TV set. This not only means a blurry CRT, but also that, given where the Amiga was designed and made, it was an NTSC TV.

http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html

I've never watched NTSC TV in my life but I remember the 1980s joke definition: "Never Twice the Same Colour".

They have a good excuse for it. They designed everything to look readable/usable on average home TV. Add the loss of quality in RF modulator and you figure the crazy colour scheme with ultra simple icons.

Another thing to keep in mind is that they’d be displayed on a CRT monitor, which makes the image much more forgivable in person.

I agree to Steve Jobs non technical comment on this. They have no taste. Look to Macintosh interface where they just had 2 colours and comically lower resolution. OS/2 IBM ones look like a mainframe having a concept desktop. They don't have too much taste either. The low specs of the time isn't an excuse to ship ugly icons and fonts.

The resolution was actually higher on Mac. CGA (in its "high-resolution" monochrome mode) was only 640x200!

Hey, at least Win 2.x allowed overlapping windows. Recall that Win 1.0x only permitted tiled windows.

The PC graphics ecosystem was crap at the time (VGA was introduced around the time of Win 2.x shipping).

from the OldNewThing blog, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100625-00/?p=13... :

    the Color Graphics Adapter, better known by the abbreviation CGA...
    ...320×200 color mode ...or 1:2.4 in 640×200 monochrome mode. Windows used the monochrome mode because the colors available in color mode were pretty useless. You could have black, white, hot pink, and aqua; or you could have black, brown, orange-red and green (no white!). 

    ...next major advancement in display adapter technology was the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), which brought you a stunning 16 colors in a 640×350 grid with an aspect ratio of 1.83:1. But for the step forward in terms of color, you also took a step backwards into the insanity of planar video modes. EGA memory was arranged in planes, and what’s worse, each plane had the same memory address! You had to use other registers to program the video card to tell it which plane you wanted to talk to when you accessed a specific memory address.

For many of the Mac developers, like Bill Atkinson, Mac OS was their second version of GUI OS, after working on the Lisa.

And the Intel 8088's segmented memory architecture is more mental work than the flat address space of the Motorola 68K (all those data and address registers on the 68K are nice too).

The pre-Win 3.0 fonts were ugly. That's why I ignored Windows and developed for the Mac.

I suspect that Windows used monochrome mode to squeeze 78 characters per line, not because the colours were "useless".

CGA graphics is tricky, but it can look at least as pretty as contemporary ZX Spectrum: https://media.tech.lgbt/media_attachments/files/112/481/028/...

Not very many people cared for CGA, though.

Graphic cards at the time only had 16 colors. Not 16-bit color. 16 colors in total.

VGA was already on the market for 9 months by the time Windows 2 released.

Imagine the backlash: "new Windows version requires a $300 video card and a $400 monitor to run". When Windows 95 finally dropped the support for EGA, many people were upset (including me).

9 months? LOL

Thunderbolt 5 was released about 1 year ago. You can count the number of all laptops that support Thunderbolt 5 with two hands (probably one hand, but to err on the safe side).

Is there any reason they took the most ugly colours? They could have just used 16 nice colours or?

There is a reason why they're the most ugly colours. Windows 2 only can display 8 colours: CMY+RGB+Black+White. Cheap colour monitors had only four input pins - RGBI - and could at best display those eight colours, plus a darker version of them.

They used the colors which had the best contrast against each other and if there was a driver issue, colors which looked the more appropriate in greyscale. Driver issues, forgotten today, drove most architectural decisions at Microsoft. The core word they used was ‘working with partners’. People used to bring it up all the time in interviews in the 80s regarding PC’s but not all in one computers like Apple and to a degree amiga. I remember people used to watch football on television on portable tv’s which was only made possible because the jerseys had a light and dark version which visiting teams would get to choose which one they get.

Not true. 16 colors at a time. EGA had a color palette of 64 colors. Depending on the card, precise palette cycling can be used to appear to have all 64 colors available so long as too many different pixels aren't used too close together.

That wasn't really a possibility for anything but static fullscreen images, or extremely optimized demos. Even then it would be difficult, since there is no way to generate an interrupt at a specific raster position (unlike CGA, where the pixel clock was synchronized with the system timer chip).

I didn't say it was for full-motion video or arbitrary images. Interactive calibration is possible.

Windows 2 was an ugly duckling, yes. The interface was ham-fisted by coders, and it was supposed to support non-square monochrome pixels of CGA monitors, to make it worse.

That being said, I am really curious about your perception of other old systems, as I am trying to design an interface that can run on the 80s hardware. What is the earliest OS that you can tolerate? Macintosh from 1984, Windows 3, Windows 95, something even later?

If you have a moment, I would also appreciate your feedback on my UI, too. It is called "Orihime", and you can find the links to images in the "Pixel?art" section of ninakalinina.com/links.htm

Orihime looks very CRT Nostalgic. I don’t care much for anime and it looks like you are pretty committed to it. I thought black and white MacOS was brilliant, but the amount of clicking and holding you had to do for everything is better left in the past.

Thank you! I'll take a note :)

Nina, thank you for the article. Was really well written and a true pleasure to read. I've learned quite a number of new details, thanks to you.

> They look hideous to me. The composition of colors and irritating fonts is just so over the top and distracting.

They look better than Windows 10 or 11. At least the GUI elements are visible, titlebars are titlebars and scrollbars have the right width and arrows.

Well, you didn't really have many choices for colors and fonts back in the day.

Whenever I scroll past the reversi screenshot it jiggles and shakes, very strange effect!

I think this is a bug with smooth scrolling of pixel perfect scaled images. I'm not quite sure though.

Windows 2 can be run on modern hardware using DosBox[0]. If like me your old install media is deep in an attic somewhere, you can still get them from lovely archive.org[1].

[0]: https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Software:Windows2x

[1]: https://archive.org/details/windows2x

A surprisingly detailed writeup, nice.

But what's the misleading anecdote from Raymond Chen? The claim piqued my interest but I didn't catch that part.

The answer to that is in the "sources" section. Raymond Chen first claims that Windows 2.x supported protected mode (which is half-true; it could run DOS applications in protected mode, but neither kernel nor applications supported it), and then finishes with saying "standard mode (Windows/286 style)" which is just wrong, as explained in the section about protected mode Windows kernel.

> You need 3.0 for Solitaire, 3.1 for Minesweeper, and WfW for Hearts.

To complete the set: and Win32s for FreeCell.

IIRC the first product that shipped with Win32s was Windows NT 3.1 (the first version, so numbered to be in sync with Windows 3.1).

Freecell was NT-only and relatively niche until it was also released with Win95.

Windows NT shipped with full-fat Win32.

Win32s was designed to bring some of the benefits of 32-bit computing to Windows 3.x. The 's' is for 'subset', and only the Win32 APIs that corresponded to Win16 APIs available in Windows 3.1 were available. But this was enough to support Freecell on Windows 3.1.

And not just Freecell. Here is a list of compatible programs; it includes Photoshop 4, Nero Burning ROM 4.0, Space Cadet Pinball, ICQ: http://stephan.win31.de/w32slist.htm#list

There are only few things that stop compilers producing Win32s-compatible code. Linking with CRTDLL.LIB will make even Visual Studio 2010 (and perhaps newer versions) produce a valid Win32s program.

> Win32s was Windows NT 3.1

No, that's badly wrong. You are confusing Win32s with Win32.

But the mix-up seems to go deeper.

Win32 is an API. Nothing exactly "ships with it". Various products implement some of Win32, including Windows NT, Windows 95/98/ME, and WINE.

Win32s is a package, so it's something that an OS could "ship with" -- but nothing ever did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s

Win32s is a sort of shim for 16-bit Windows that implements a subset (thus the "S") of Win32 allowing some binaries that targeted Win32 to launch and execute on 16-bit Windows.

In other words, in 1992 Win32s was a thing you could install on Windows 3.1 that implemented enough of the API of the as-yet-unreleased Windows NT so that some simple apps could launch and run.

It came with the Freecell game as a demo. Original Windows Freecell was only ever a 32-bit app.

It enabled developers working on apps for the forthcoming 32-bit Windows to test code on a released OS without the hassle of running on a beta OS that was, AFAICR, fairly tightly controlled, hard to get, wouldn't run on many computers in 1992-1993, and for which the supported hardware cost a lot: £5000 or so.

Whereas Win 3.1 could run on any old clunker.

It wasn't really for distribution, because not much worked and it wasn't very stable. I don't think anyone sane would try to ship a 32-bit app to Windows 3.1 users.

Fun fact #1: Win32s is still out there for download.

https://winworldpc.com/product/win32s/130

You can unzip it, extract FREECELL.EXE and a couple of other files, and enjoy the original tiny fast Freecell on Windows 11, even on Arm. Works great.

(The modern Freecell is a bloated thing that wants an internet connection and some online accounts.)

Fun fact #2: Win32s caused IBM real pain with OS/2 >=2. It sort of ran under WinOS2 inside OS/2 and that enabled IBM to claim in marketing materials that OS/2 could run 32-bit Windows apps without really blatantly lying.

(Aside for those too young to have used IBM OS/2... WinOS2 was a real licensed copy of Windows 3.0 and later Windows 3.1 which ran in a VM inside OS/2 >= 2, and it let OS/2 run 16-bit Windows apps on the OS/2 desktop. The IBM and Microsoft co-development agreement gave IBM a license to use Microsoft's code. So IBM modified Win3.x to run seamlessly on the OS/2 DOS VM. Later, IBM shipped a cheaper version of OS/2 Warp which didn't include WinOS2 but could integrate an existing installation of Windows 3.1 from your hard disk. This wasn't just cost-saving: it meant that OS/2 picked up and could run all your existing installed Windows applications. That could be a big time saving. Snag: Windows _drivers_ didn't work under OS/2 so it didn't always work. Bigger snag: you couldn't uninstall it again; it was a one-way migration. Even bigger snag: IBM gave away time-bombed demo versions. A time-bombed OS is not a great idea. Even if users liked it, and bought the full thing, they had to reinstall.)

So, MS kept "updating" Win32s so that it did naughty things with memory allocation that broke WinOS2.

IBM kept updating WinOS2 to run it.

Eventually MS succeeded and WinOS2 could not run Win32s 1.30.

https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Installing_Win32s_in...

At that exact point, Microsoft mysteriously stopped finding any more bugs and stopped updating Win32. What a baffling puzzle!

Thanks for this, this was very helpful!

Sorry I completely misremembered what Win32s was, but unfortunately I can’t edit/delete it now. But the context you provided is amazing, especially the OS/2 bits.

:-)

There was also WinG library for Win32s, which enabled implementation of graphically intensive games. Predecessor of DirectX according to the link.

https://www.uvlist.net/groups/info/wingapi

WfW ! Reminded me of this for some reason . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing

Then I also remember win32s on WfW which would then run win95 pinball!

Early GUIs look garish because the designers could not apply color theory even if they wanted to, given the hardware of the time.

The only reasonable alternative would have been to go monochromatic like early Mac, X-Windows (all those stippled patterns!) I guess Microsoft felt that people wanted color more than they wanted aesthetics, and the market backed them up in spades.

The monochrome GEM TOS and the Mac did it fine.

Xword it's also a software to do crosswords for Unix.

And these taipei icons looks pretty close to the ones from Xmahjongg and such.

https://www.lcdf.org/xmahjongg/

I have checked both, and while there are similarities, I think they both share a common ancestor - some physical Mahjongg tiles. This Windows Taipei 1 is written by " Bogus Software Inc", and Windows 3.0 Taipei, which uses a very similar interface and tiles, is made by "David Norris" from Redmond WA.

And it seems to be David C Norris, a software engineer from Microsoft: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidcnorris/details/experience/

Here are more details about Bogus Software: https://minesweepergame.com/history/bogus-software.php

The unambiguous ⇩ ⇧ arrows for minimize/maximize. Instantly recognizable pallete icons. Straightforward titlebar without pixel-wasting clutter. With a contemporary color scheme there'd be nothing wrong with it today - sure is more intuitive.

Personally I find them a bit ambiguous.

I get that they probably (I'm assuming) represent moving the titlebar to the top (maximizing) or to the bottom (minimizing) of the screen, but I can see someone who doesn't already know what they do assuming they're for changing between windows.

To be fair, the modern maximize/minimize icons that Windows uses are not that much better. The minimize button doesn't even represent what a taskbar entry looks like (by default) anymore.