Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

Posted by elvis70 3/30/2025

Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room(github.com)

568 points | 313 commentspage 3

rbanffy 3/30/2025|

How cute… imagine my childhood home would have a computer with a graphical desktop…

I feel so old now…

cmrdporcupine 3/30/2025||

Yeah as far as GUIs go, Win95 isn't in the "nostalgia" category for me, I was already well into adulthood.

I kind of get the appeal, but it's also unnecessarily skeumorphic/fake-3d and there were some UX things that made little sense especially lumping all the window controls all together (including the destructive "close" X) where MacOS smartly separated them.

abraxas 3/30/2025|||

The fake 3d is actually very useful in communicating what is a button or another interactive piece of the interface and what's not. The modern clean uis where everything is a thin rectangle or just text that you are supposed to click are a nightmare.

alabastervlog 3/30/2025|||

Old screen caps of UIs with depth feel so relaxing to look at, and I don’t think it’s just a nostalgia effect.

It’s like there’s always just a little extra brain power and attention being used by modern flat UIs, and you get to shut that off when you look at a depth-enhanced UI.

rbanffy 3/30/2025||

The most important part is that controls are consistent across applications. In that regard, tools and libraries that implement some look and feel rather than deferring it to the underlying environment are a disservice to users.

Windows, for instance, has dozens of ways to do that, and you can find parts of Windows that use an archeological version of the controls. Nobody, it seems, bothered to reimplement the older APIs on top of the new ones.

rbanffy 3/30/2025|||

I agree. Early Macs had to give buttons a 2D distinctive look. A good thing was that the look and feel were part of the OS and not the application, so everything would be consistent.

mrweasel 3/30/2025||||

> where MacOS smartly separated them.

Interesting that modern macOS now have them next to each other, like Windows.

You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional. I'm still a firm believe that the majority of the work we do with computers today could be done within the Windows 95 shell. We need 64bit, more memory, faster CPUs, GPUs all that, but the modern UI aren't really "better", if anything many of them are more confusing. I think a lot of office works would be happy to just have kept the Window 95 era UI for Windows and Office.

rbanffy 3/30/2025|||

> You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional.

Ironically, the Windows 95 look seems a lot like a copy of the NeXT look, which is the OS all modern Macs are kind of running.

cmrdporcupine 3/30/2025|||

Yeah frankly I'd take the NeXT UI over any of them, including Mac OS X, which felt like a huge step backwards to me compared to NeXTstep

EDIT: Sun's OpenLook is the other one from that era that was fantastic

chuckadams 3/30/2025|||

The window decorations in Win95 are in fact pixel-for-pixel copies of the ones in NeXTSTEP.

cmrdporcupine 3/31/2025||

Note that NeXTstep actually did the right thing with window controls -- close is on opposite side of the window from the others, so you can't accidentally hit it.

Windows3 and Motif hid this stuff under a menu, so wasn't a huge concern.

But then Windows95, and then (oddly) MacOS through this away in favour of throwing them all together.

Awareness of spatial patterns / frequency of use seems to have been higher among early UX/UI designers than after. I guess maybe because mice became more accurate?

Gormo 3/31/2025|||

> I'm still a firm believe that the majority of the work we do with computers today could be done within the Windows 95 shell.

Wasn't that one of the ideas behind SerenityOS?

fallsoffbikes 3/30/2025|||

Though Apple has forgotten or ignored this in products like the Apple tv where restart and factory reset are right next to each other.

pwython 3/30/2025||

Especially when you're using that tiny trackpad remote. Overall, Apple TV works, but most of the apps UX suck, and that's not Apple's fault.

spacedcowboy 3/30/2025||

Yeah. My first computer I soldered the chips/resistors/capacitors/etc to the PCB... It had 1K of RAM, and the screen memory had to come out of that too...

Someone wrote chess for it.

[aside] It was a Sinclair ZX-81, and I was 11 at the time. My parents bought the kit and a second-hand black & white TV with a dial-tuner (no pushbuttons to change the channel) as an Xmas present ...

I loved the TV, it was my TV when we only had one other in the house. I watched everything on that TV (even snooker and swore I could tell which ball was which)... After a couple of months, my dad started to get annoyed I'd not bothered to build the computer, so I was dispatched to the shed to build it.

A few days later (hey, I was in school), the thing worked and I was working my way through the (rather excellent) manual that came with it, getting to know it. One of the logic chapters had an example:

[P]RINT 1+1=2

(It was tokenised input, so you just pressed P and PRINT would come up in the built-in BASIC). Anyone here can see that the answer would be logical-true because 1+1 does equal 2, and indeed the computer printed "1" on the next line.

Anyway, flush with this futuristic knowledge, I set it all up using the family TV in the lounge, and we went through the same thing, just to prove to everyone that it worked...

[P]RINT 1+1=2

"I knew it. You've buggered it", said my dad in disgust as he got up and walked out the room. I tried to explain the (new to me) concept of logical truth to him and how the computer represented it, but I don't think he ever really believed me...

[/aside]

Anyway, that Sinclair ZX81 fundamentally changed my life. Computers and computing opened up a whole new world. Some 45 years later I'm about to retire from Apple as one of their most senior engineers, having been here for the last 20 years. Anyone with any Apple device is running some of the software I've written over the years which is kind of cool, but it's time to bow out.

flas9sd 3/30/2025||

seen the win32 aesthetic used for higher-order reasons: separating "work mode" from playtime. An extra user to do so on the same machine helps.

Connect the dots reading https://www.marginalia.nu/log/99_context/ and seeing the ui change in old vs new screencasts https://www.youtube.com/@ViktorLofgren/videos

fc417fc802 3/31/2025|

> I get significantly more work done when I unplug my computer from the Internet.

I tried this, but documentation is often a huge problem. Increasing amounts of it are primarily online and not particularly straightforward to mirror locally.

flas9sd 4/1/2025||

you could try Zealdocs - it was a reason to go reading more of the projects own documentation pages. There are converters for whatever-doc/ssg-framework a project uses to Docset, the packaged format it relies on. Though ignoring that, how approachable the docs are to different levels of experience is another thing.

I learned heaps from treating a REPL as an (offline) escape room, in terms of how to get inline help, variable introspection and debugging tricks. Not every language offers a convenient one though.

qalmakka 3/31/2025||

This is awesome. IMHO the Windows 2000 UI was the pinnacle of UX, it's still unmatched to this day. I'd love to see the SerenityOS UI ported on Linux+Wayland someday.

jemurray 3/30/2025||

My childhood home would need DOS. Maybe deskview for multitasking. :)

xtracto 3/30/2025||

Dosshell ha! Or xtree gold . Great times.

esafak 3/30/2025||

DESQview with a Q for Quarterdeck :)

deadbabe 3/30/2025||

This looks neat, but the problem with all these nostalgia fueled projects is that if you use it seriously you’re basically LARPing being in a kinder past. Eventually it just gives an empty feeling, and you long for days when interfaces didn’t just look like this for fun, it’s because that’s what they simply were, and this was the state of the art. But you can never go back to those days.

geor9e 3/30/2025||

I remember a couple kids with Windows 95 PCs at home. They seemed like such richie rich's. We'd all play Wolfenstein when we'd sleep over at their houses. My childhood computer was a WebTV, hacked to get dialup internet for free, on a 100 lb CRT TV from Goodwill. I finally scraped up the money for an actual PC some time in highschool.

skissane 3/31/2025||

A Windows 3.x UI theme would get the childhood nostalgia going much stronger for me than a 95/NT4/98/2000/Me theme does.

Occasionally I boot up Windows 3.1 in a VM and play a game of Solitaire, for old time’s sake - I can run Windows 95 in a VM too, but it just doesn’t have the same pull.

Gormo 3/31/2025|

Win3.1 works great in DOSBox, and you can get an even more authentic '80s-'90s IBM-compatible experience using PCEm or 86box, which emulate a wide variety of PC motherboards, graphics cards, and sound cards.

brundolf 3/30/2025||

Based on the description I was hoping it would include some classic DOS and Windows games to play via wine :)

jwitchel 3/30/2025||

Usually the observation that “a widely used thing is objectively bad” is strong market signal for entrepreneurial opportunity in a big tam.

I for one would welcome a set of deeply integrated ui improvements in a Mac that included a better file manager, better window management, better desktop search, a contact manager just that worked, a messaging client that just worked, audio and camera controls that just worked, a calculator that didn’t suck, etc.

I’d pay at least $100 a year for that tool set.

rauli_ 3/30/2025|

That Git GUI got my attention. Does anyone have an idea what it might be? The titlebar says aurora but when I searched for it all I got was an commercial product with AI nonsense stuck into it.

hexmiles 3/30/2025|

From the look i suspect it is gitg: a git frontend for gnome.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gitg

priteau 3/30/2025||

Looks like it. The aurora title comes from the Git repository they are viewing: https://github.com/ublue-os/aurora

More comments...