[jwells89]

In the case of Windows, that consistency wasn’t ever really there at any point. DOS was the Wild West when it came to UI and much of that carried over to Windows — it wasn’t unusual to come across Windows programs that looked nothing like the OS in the 95/98/ME/2k/XP era.

It was more of a thing on Macs, which never had a point where the platform didn’t provide guidance for what programs should look like, and that only got stronger with the introduction of OS X where non-native programs stuck out like a sore thumb due to looking so supremely unpolished next to apps built with Cocoa or Carbon, which were richly nuanced.

To my memory, all of this flipped with the introduction of flat design, when it became more acceptable to build software that didn’t have much love put towards UI design. An electron (or similar, e.g. CEF) app built using Material Design 1.0 stuck out much less starkly when framed by the flattened Helveticized OS X Yosemite or Windows 8 than it did framed by OS X Mavericks or Windows 7.

[marcosdumay]

Every thing looked pretty much the same in the Windows 3 line. And almost everything looked the same on the NT line.

At the time of Windows 95, things were still basically homogeneous.

[ok123456]

> DOS was the Wild West when it came to UI

You could tell when something was made with Borland and TUI. Professional applications tended to look alike.

[lproven]

[Article author here]

This is true... but, to be fair, there were a handful of apps that went out of their way to look like Turbovision apps but weren't, and by the same token, it was possible to create (e.g.) Delphi apps that didn't look like it.

The first console text editor I really liked on Linux was SETedit.

https://setedit.sourceforge.net/#scrnsht

That, I think, uses a 3rd party independent clone of Turbovision.

[quantified]

Mac has dispensed with consistency. Lots of secret handshakes, undiscoverable actions impossible to perform with a mouse for example.