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Discussion (10 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It was more like one company with a stranglehold on the market was terrible. The intensity of that has waxed and waned, but that's been true from then all the way until now.
> Before August 1995, using a computer was an intimidating ordeal. You either knew how to handle black command lines or you were stuck with some pretty patched-up graphical interfaces.
Did the author just blank the entire Mac computer line-up from their memory? System 1 had a finder/menu/window management/etc. and came out all the way back in '84.
"Before it, using a computer was synonymous with staring at the black MS-DOS screen. Want to play a game? You had to type annoying commands like cd C:\games\doom and pray the system wouldn't throw a conventional memory error."
Wrong, obviously, since Windows already existed. But then comes this odd statement:
"Windows 3.1, which came before, was just a shell on top of DOS. It was a messy pile of floating windows that easily got lost behind one another."
Also wrong. There wasn't anything fundamentally different about window management in 95. And Program Manager was a much better way to organize and access applications than the Start menu, which violated Microsoft's own guidelines for nested-menu depth.
The Start menu created a problem that has only gotten worse. Installers would create entire sub-menus by vendor name; so instead of looking for "TurboCAD," for example, you'd somehow be expected to look under "Imsi." Obnoxious.
For a while you could still put your applications into groups in the Start menu, if you knew where to go in the filesystem. So, get this, you could put your audio apps into one group, your dev tools in another, your graphics applications in another... INCREDIBLE, right? And some installers did the right thing and asked you where in the Start menu you wanted to app shortcut to be.
But today, organizing your apps is essentially impossible. Yeah, you can "pin" a limited number of them here and there, but still not in groups. The sad thing is that Apple has regressed on this too, with the deletion of Launchpad. Now you're wading through hundreds of applications.
I agree that Microsoft advanced the GUI more than anyone else in the '90s, but it has undone all of that and more by now. What a disaster the Windows UI is today.