[massifist]

I has always assumed Program Manager's window decorations were inspired by Motif but apparently it was the other way around, regarding Presentation Manager; Program Manager's ancestor.

"Motif was directly inspired by the look and feel of the Presentation Manager interface"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_Manager#Presentat...

[cmrdporcupine]

In this day and age I think the mock-3d stuff in Motif looks gaudier than the classic look of both the Win 3.11 interface and the OS/2 Presentation Manager.

[jhbadger]

i think the "mock 3d" stuff was ultimately inspired by NextStep (1988), although they did it in a classier way than Windows, Motif, or the Mac (either in the late classic (8 or 9) or OSX)

[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah I made this same point a few days ago on a similar topic about the use of the win95 style in SerenityOS, etc.

I remember back when NeXTstep was new, really lusting over one, but all I had was my little Atari ST.. and spending many hours writing up pretend 3d relief widgets in GFA Basic on it. We were in love with our colour palettes and the illusions they could give :-)

I loved the NeXT interface for years but it feels stylistically over the top to me now. Love the draggable menus tho.

Another GUI that had 3d relief that I feel did it really nice was Sun's OpenLook style. I used olwm as my window manager for many years. Always preferred that over Motif.

[LeFantome]

I still love the look of NeXTstep. I never liked the scroll bars though even though they make logical sense.

A surprising amount of the original UI survives into macOS.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

There's a Computer Chronicles episode somewhere on YouTube (doubtless also on archive.org in higher quality) where a Microsoft rep shows off Windows 3's user interface, and they outright say it looks like Presentation Manager, so it'll prepare users for OS/2. Back when MS hadn't decided to kill OS/2!

[pjmlp]

IBM was able to kill OS/2 all by itself, regardless of Microsoft's own doings.

[LeFantome]

They all implement IBM’s Common User Access guidelines:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access