[MoonWalk]

"To be fair, Microsoft & Bill Gates are bad at quality user experience."

In some ways. Gates deserves never-ending enmity for plaguing us with backslashes in paths. But in others, Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s.

"Would of?"

[rbanffy]

> Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s.

There is no universe where that is true.

[badsectoracula]

There is: this one.

Win95's UI was so incredibly influential that stuff introduced by it are still around to this day.

[rbanffy]

I don't really remember many Windows 95 firsts. One I remember is the ability to switch users without logging off. MacOS famously copied that (with a 3D cube look).

I think they made something really revolutionary at the IE3 time. Their News and Mail app was an Explorer extension that placed an e-mail reader as the presentation of a folder full of folders of mailboxes and messages. You wouldn't see the extension, as the apps launched as applications, but that's what the implementation looked like from what I investigated back then.

Unfortunately, the idea was seemingly abandoned almost immediately. I would love to have such views on top of a user-space file system keeping messages, address books, and calendars in sync.

[badsectoracula]

I meant UI stuff like the desktop metaphor (Macintosh also had one but Win95's approach was more popular and mimicked in other environments), the start menu, the taskbar, etc, some newly introduced controls like tabs (i think OS/2 had tab-like controls/containers but they worked differently to those in Win95 and nowadays pretty much all tabs work like in Win95).

[ButlerianJihad]

At my first ISP job, I eventually started using mh for mail. It was based on an awesome concept of sorting everything into directories and having procmail and various helpers to pre-process, including upon receipt and reading. I remember little of the details, but it was truly for the gung-ho neckbeard crowd, and it was well-suited for processing "large amounts" of mail (1993 style). I think MMDF was the MTA trying to do similar things in that vein. Meanwhile my boss was in love with PINE...

Of course, working at an ISP I could also telnet to our NNTP server and read Usenet on the local filesystem. Ugh.

[twoodfin]

I think that’s right, but it’s fair to point out that Windows 95 was (if you believe Steven Sinofsky, who should know) heavily influenced by NeXT!

https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-passwo...

[badsectoracula]

I know about the theme, i'm using Window Maker which uses a theme closer to NextStep and occasionally i hack on a toolkit[0] that has a Next-ish look (and feel, to some extent).

However i meant stuff like the desktop metaphor (Macintosh also had one but Win95's approach was more popular and mimicked in other environments), the start menu, the taskbar, etc, some newly introduced controls like tabs (i think OS/2 had tab-like controls/containers but they worked differently to those in Win95 and nowadays pretty much all tabs work like in Win95).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/yaU5OLn.png

[rbanffy]

The use of recessed surfaces for displaying information and the rectangular buttons were very NeXT-like, but more compact because it needed to work at VGA resolutions, but I don't think they managed to capture the essence of their framework which is, impressively, still alive in every Mac sold.

I wonder how hard it would be to get NeXT source from the 1990's and compile it on macOS 26.

[ThrowawayB7]

And the contemporaneous counterexamples are what? The various UNIX windows managers and X11? System 6-8 on the '90s Macs? None of those were great UI/UX IMO.

[rbanffy]

The big thing I remember from Windows back then were contextual menus (Windows 95 vs MacOS 8), the Start menu and Explorer (Not sure why the Mac never developed one - apps were easier to find, I guess) with a folder tree on the left, which Finder lacked (but you could always have two windows with different views). In general, the user experience with Macs was smoother than with Windows, with the move to PowerPC being a huge improvement in performance over the 68040 models.

As pointed out elsewhere, NeXT broke a lot of new ground at that time, thanks in part to its Unix underpinnings. Also Adobe brought great font management to both PCs and Mac before both embraced TrueType. Next had sub pixel anti-aliasing from the start.