I've spent too much time on that website I think I've developed an appreciation of GUIs before the mid-nineties:<p>Buttons for everything, no hidden corners and such, no excessive skeuomorphism, respect of preferences in colors and fonts, low feature creep, no excessive social media integration and network services 'integration' (AOL, MSN).<p>What happened since? The open-source world hasn't offered anything of that caliber, so I guess there was a shift in thinking at some point.
This is one of those amazing free resources that makes the Internet amazing. I wish Wikipedia's sections on each of these OS's had such comprehensive screenshots and writeup.<p>also: I had forgotten how many Windows 3.x shells there were.<p><a href="http://toastytech.com/guis/indexshells.html" rel="nofollow">http://toastytech.com/guis/indexshells.html</a>
The Xerox Alto had a start button back twenty years before Windows 95!<p><a href="http://toastytech.com/guis/altoboot1.gif" rel="nofollow">http://toastytech.com/guis/altoboot1.gif</a>
Does anyone know why pretty much all of the PARC's successors choose to orient their monitors in "landscape" mode as opposed to "portrait" as was done on the PARC? Reading and working is so much easier in portrait mode. You get to see a lot more without having to scroll all the time.
I recall spending silly amounts of time years ago trying to locate some of the more exotic stuff on that site (particularly GlobalView & NewWave). Nice to see that direct access to these important historical resources is much improved since then.<p>Looks like CommonPoint is still the one that got away; oddly it's probably the most interesting one (<a href="http://root.cern.ch/TaligentDocs/TaligentOnline/DocumentRoot/1.0/Docs/books/HI/HI_10.html#HEADING21" rel="nofollow">http://root.cern.ch/TaligentDocs/TaligentOnline/DocumentRoot...</a>).
Looking at BeOS screenshots make me relive the disappointment I felt as a Mac owner in the 90s when Apple decided not to use BeOS as its next generation OS. It was quite a bit ahead of its time.
I laughed obnoxiously loud in the office when I saw the IE evil page with the Bill Gates satin face. <a href="http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html</a><p>Thanks for publishing this little gem. It's fun to look at most of the old interfaces that I never saw (pre-Win'98).
Those Xerox Alto screenshots are amazing; I cannot imagine how exciting it must have been developing the seeds of the GUI way back in the mid 70s. Something about that font makes it more pleasing than anything we have around today.
Oh, wow, this Amiga OS 1.x takes me back:<p><a href="http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1default.png" rel="nofollow">http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1default.png</a><p>I rember, even then, thinking -- well this might be ugly, but they sure got the contrast right -- and everything is really visible/obvious. But I mean seriously: orange on blue -- that takes some serious "usability trumps looks"-focus...<p>[edit: And also, even back then, I thought; wow, these black/orange scrollbars are really confusing - what signifies where I am, and how much I can "scroll to"...]
Wow, I had a flashback to 1998!<p>Seriously, though, great collection of GUIs. It's cool to see some aspects of those window managers that are still in our modern operating systems.
Reminds me of the Interface Hall of Shame [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://interfacehallofshame.eu/www.iarchitect.com/lotus.htm" rel="nofollow">http://interfacehallofshame.eu/www.iarchitect.com/lotus.htm</a>