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.