Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

Amazing walk through memory lane, and super useful. One big omission though - starting in the early 1990s, we should be seeing some Linux desktops in there, but I didn’t see any through 1995 or so when I stopped browsing. Also, Irix would be nice to get — although I don’t recall if SGI had much in the way of custom vibes for their window managers, they certainly had amazingly cool 3D demos.

A nice vibe coding project here would be to show these in a carousel with the UI being 1:1 pixels. It’s hard to understand just how different NeXTStep (Did I capitalize that correctly?) felt from Windows — part of it was refresh rates, but part of it was going from 800x600 to 1132x800-ish on the monitor. Color, refresh rates, monitor quality, a cool plastic color and design for the box were all part of the experience.

I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab.

Probably also worth dropping this here in the off chance someone here will be part of today's lucky 10,000. http://toastytech.com/guis/

At first glance it looks like this is much more breadth over depth. Quite an array of systems here.

I really wish Windows 11 had a Windows 2000 mode. I want a grey, boxy UI, but I also want al the modern technologies Windows has introduced since—DirectStorage, D3D12, fast SSDs, device-independent pixels and vector UIs, all written directly against a Windows API that is modernised, safe, and easy to use. No React, no ads in my weather app; the only browser on my computer will be the browser itself.

Invisible scroll bars are a source of constant annoyance. And it sometimes takes me several attempts to move a window, because of all the various clickable things without visible boundaries. Frustrating.

The man behind this site is known for his skills of recoverying data from QIC tapes. Looking at the "Software Library" section makes me always wonder if it will be released at some point, since that there is some stuff that isn't on BitSavers or other sites.

OK, does anyone actually remember if half of the systems of the 80s really had such perfect font rendering or is this just some emulation 'current version'?

The first computers I used were 486 with DOS and early Pentiums with Windows 3.11 and nothing looked nearly as nice. Some of those old screenshots look A LOT better than stuff 10 years later that I used (incl MacOS 8 or 9).

My favorites:

GEM + Ventura Publisher http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/ventura-publisher-1....

Viewpoint http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-p...

AUX http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/aux-3.0.1.png

It's suprising at first look that GEM tops my preferences but I recall having a very fond time on the Atari ST 520+. It had one of the best b/w monitors and TOS+GEM was orderly and uncluttered.

Only preemptive multitasking and per-window menus were missing. As a plus, the OS was in ROM, so boot times were <1s.

I love this kind of thing :) I finally have a second site to bookmark alongside this similar collection: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots

This leaves me kind of sad, that we've had such little innovation in desktop / window-managers for 30 years.

Certainly it doesn't feel any easier to manage multiple windows than when we had a quarter of the screen space.

Alleycat in CGA just hit me hard.

For the people that didn’t live through this time, lining these images up makes it obvious why those that did speak of how visually impressive the Amiga was.

This is like porn for me :)

It's one of my favourite things, looking at and analyzing older interfaces. Some are lovely, some are cute, some are ugly, but most are... "naïve"? I love to think about the effort, the research, the trials and tribulations. I feel I will spend a great deal of time in this page!

So much gray, even when the hardware could do color. Perhaps for compatibility with other hardware or get out of the way?

I miss the old days. Thirty years ago, 64MB of RAM was considered a thing (http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/winnt-4.0-ppc-new.in...)

While I recognize many of these, I had no idea about the IBM Academic Operating System (a version of UNIX for their RT RISC workstations distinct from the normal IBM version AIX). There are just snippets of info about this OS on Wikipedia and other sites -- I wonder why IBM created it when they already had AIX.

Nostalgic for VAXstation/DECwindows terminals where at the time the monitor weighed more than I did.

Can't help noticing how the interface and general mechanics of these old OSes were tightly coupled to the hardware. Both the makers and users of that era seemed to relish that vibe. I know I certainly do.

However, that paradigm made computers daunting for anyone who wasn't an enthusiast. While I’m nostalgic for that level of transparency, I recognize that those hurdles stood in the way of mass adoption.

We might lament how 'dull' or 'abstracted' modern software feels, but technology's primary purpose is utility, not just to be venerated as an artifact.

THAT SAID, I still believe that user-friendliness isn't an excuse to strip away agency.

Modern simplification shouldn't feel like a forced lobotomy of the OS (or any piece of software really). There’s no reason we can't have both: an interface that stays out of the way for the average user, while providing total control for power users.

Whatever happened to progressive disclosure?

Previously:

Historical workstation desktop interface screenshots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191713 - June 2023 (55 comments)

Retrotechnology – PC desktop screenshots from 1983-2005 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968745 - Dec 2017 (58 comments)

Where did the author get a copy of pre-X-integration NeWS, I wonder (if indeed they did). I haven’t been able to locate one online after a lot of determined searching, but I also can’t bring myself to declare that there isn’t one because the name is so ungoogleable.

It's funny how early some things do and don't look familiar. A decent chunk of unix-family OSs have changed some since then, but also kinda not. CDE 1.0 looks almost exactly like the latest version:)

I distinctly remember, and found, the NeWS (Network extensible windowing sisten), where you could develop with PostScript(TM) for application windows.

No Plan 9. Otherwise, resources like this might help studying how the interfaces of the past evolved (at least, on the surface).

Let's talk about the HP-9000 as depicted in http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/hpwindows-starbase-u...

There is a `man` entry displayed in a terminal window there. The first Unix I've ever touched was HP-UX on an HP-9000 (server series, not the workstation one), and I have this memory that the underlined words you can see in that manpage as well were actually hyperlinks you can select and would bring you to the relevant section of the manpage that discussed that term. Am I fabricating that memory or is it real? I cannot find any info about it on the Internet.

great list, would be cool to see each OS evolving over time.

NextStep/OSX was the only desktop OS that did not feel like a downgrade from Amiga Workbench

For anyone pining for innovation in Desktop, a small part of this culture is still alive in Ricing competitions.

A recent favorite of mine is this one. Timestamp starts at the final submission being reviewed: https://youtu.be/DxEKF0cuEzc?si=mqE_2vpKDBsMWlKW&t=557

I kinda miss that in the early 2000's kde and gnome shipped with a fuck ton of window decorations based on all those (then-not-so) old OS. Teenager me had fun switching them every day and playing with windowing behavior (focus follows mouse! hover to select and only one click needed!). I wonder what techy kids today do to explore and have fun.

Speaking of the early 2000's, man, Aqua was such a good design. I appreciate the nextstep paradigm and design, but Aqua was just so futuristic, in a good way.

Them beOS icons were lovely at the time

I love old desktop OSes so much I've created a Windows 3.1 theme for mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909295

Even the site with its NeXTStep style (love it).

I'm sure someone reading this thread has UAE handy in order to contribute a screenshot of AmigaOS/Workbench 1.x.

I was not ready to start my day with a OS/2 Warp nostalgia feeling

Year of release for each would be extra awesome.

> DECWindows

> /tmp/med_16.sixel

... Is that Sinfest? From before the author went weird? If so, then that's certainly a very different way of feeling old than I expected when clicking the link.

P.S.: There's another in "RiscOS 3.71", and "System V Release 4 Amiga Version 1.1" references Penny Arcade. [0]

[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/01/05/the-merch#

GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems. I first saw this on a friends' parents computer and was quite astonished why computers may look like that. I was very used to Windows/DOS back then.

I am also glad to have switched to Linux in 2004 already. Once you have been using Linux for a while, whenever I use windows I am annoyed at how slow it is. Just file copy operations alone and then billion excuses windows developers make, trying to copsplain why it is so slow. When I have to backup 30GB, I don't want an explanation why it is slow - I simply use what is faster. And that's just one advantage of many more Linux has. (I use the commandline most of the time though, so KDE and GNOME are IMO just pointless eyecandy these days.)

What a wonderful resource! HP VUE has interesting color choices and a nice "Dock"

xfm from the first Slackware print, I really liked that file manager. But these days it fails to work. I tied many years ago to get it work but failed :(

There's a lot of nostalgia in the comments here. I wonder if any reader under say 25 is willing to comment; do you think OS's today are a regression? do those look better?

To me they look unwieldy, heavy and overwhelming and I can't help but think the love for them is just the love for youth or whatever

The Cambrian period of operating systems and GUIs.

Deeply nostalgic! Thanks for sharing.

I love how little df has changed since 1985.

Sometime I wish time goes slower

That brings back memories from pre press days and the SGI Indigo machines. They did some heavy lifting for the time.

"We have learned nothing in 10,000 years."

I may have some KDE 2 and 3 screenshots to add.

Nice. A Redhat Mother’s Day set would be amazing. I didn’t screenshot much in that era, and had a catastrophic data loss in 1998 or so that was a real bummer; Usenet, emails, IRC logs. Even then it hurt, but today, ouch.

My favorites:

GEM + Ventura Publisher http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/ventura-publisher-1....

Viewpoint http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-p...

AUX http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/aux-3.0.1.png

It's suprising at first look that GEM tops my preferences but I recall having a very fond time on the Atari ST 520+. It had one of the best b/w monitors and TOS+GEM was orderly and uncluttered.

Only preemptive multitasking and per-window menus were missing. As a plus, the OS was in ROM, so boot times were <1s.

For anyone pining for innovation in Desktop, a small part of this culture is still alive in Ricing competitions.

A recent favorite of mine is this one. Timestamp starts at the final submission being reviewed: https://youtu.be/DxEKF0cuEzc?si=mqE_2vpKDBsMWlKW&t=557

Probably also worth dropping this here in the off chance someone here will be part of today's lucky 10,000. http://toastytech.com/guis/

At first glance it looks like this is much more breadth over depth. Quite an array of systems here.

ToastyTech is wonderful but don't forget GUIdebook, which also is.

https://guidebookgallery.org/

Obligatory Link to xkcd [0]

I'll be honest, 1053 might be my favourite xkcd comic ever, purely because it's so encouraging of sharing knowledge and learning new things. Always excided to see the lucky 10,000 mentioned in the wild.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Nostalgic for VAXstation/DECwindows terminals where at the time the monitor weighed more than I did.

I was not ready to start my day with a OS/2 Warp nostalgia feeling

So much gray, even when the hardware could do color. Perhaps for compatibility with other hardware or get out of the way?

That brings back memories from pre press days and the SGI Indigo machines. They did some heavy lifting for the time.

I love old desktop OSes so much I've created a Windows 3.1 theme for mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909295

great list, would be cool to see each OS evolving over time.

NextStep/OSX was the only desktop OS that did not feel like a downgrade from Amiga Workbench

We might lament how 'dull' or 'abstracted' modern software feels, but technology's primary purpose is utility, not just to be venerated as an artifact.

THAT SAID, I still believe that user-friendliness isn't an excuse to strip away agency.

Whatever happened to progressive disclosure?

I miss the old days. Thirty years ago, 64MB of RAM was considered a thing (http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/winnt-4.0-ppc-new.in...)

Even the site with its NeXTStep style (love it).

I love how little df has changed since 1985.

The Cambrian period of operating systems and GUIs.

Previously:

Historical workstation desktop interface screenshots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191713 - June 2023 (55 comments)

Retrotechnology – PC desktop screenshots from 1983-2005 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968745 - Dec 2017 (58 comments)

xfm from the first Slackware print, I really liked that file manager. But these days it fails to work. I tied many years ago to get it work but failed :(

Them beOS icons were lovely at the time

Sometime I wish time goes slower

Deeply nostalgic! Thanks for sharing.

What a wonderful resource! HP VUE has interesting color choices and a nice "Dock"

You want Linux.

Hardware features are contained in the kernel. GUI has nothing to do with them.

GUI frameworks provide features for applications to draw their UI.

A selection of numerous windows managers and desktop environments allows you to choose the best GUI shell to work in.

It is somewhat of a bazaar, with different components sometimes not fitting perfectly into each other and there's a constant migration to a best new thing, whether it's systemd, pulseaudio, wayland or pipewire, but generally things work OK and it's not like Windows today offers a significantly different experience.

Windows is beyond salvation at this point.

OK, does anyone actually remember if half of the systems of the 80s really had such perfect font rendering or is this just some emulation 'current version'?

The monitors of the time were a lot blurrier than the screen you're looking at the screenshots on. For maximum verisimilitude you'd have to have photographs of screens.

I got an 800x600 LCD monitor in about 1999, and it was a massive upgrade.

Older OSs had pixel fonts, which were carefully hand-crafted --- vector fonts were something which folks dreamed about having, or which were accessed when using incredibly expensive printers.

Font rendering on Windows 3.11 was pretty decent, so long as one used the nicer TrueType fonts --- Times New Roman and Arial had man _years_ of hinting effort by Monotype which kicked in at typically screen sizes --- that said, certain apps would still use the older pixel fonts Tms Rmn and Helv (over which Linotype sued for trademark infringement which is part of why Monotype got the contract) as well as the "vector fonts" Roman and Modern which are (one can still access them in Windows 11) stick/plotter fonts like to the Hershey fonts. When I bought my copy of Windows 3.0, I drove almost 100 miles into Richmond to get a copy of Adobe Type Manager 1.0 for Windows.

On GNU/Linux run this command, it will fix it for all the GTK based desktops, such as XFCE, Gnome and Mate:

               gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling false

Under Mac you might have a similar Cocoa setting or whatever is called (nsproperties?) with "defaults write".

This leaves me kind of sad, that we've had such little innovation in desktop / window-managers for 30 years.

Certainly it doesn't feel any easier to manage multiple windows than when we had a quarter of the screen space.

I am starting to think the top half of the screen should be the desktop, the bottom half should be the start menu but already activated and full of programs. No conventional bottom panel-bar with a start button. A right-most column should exist that fills up with a list of opened windows. [1]

When I first saw Win95 with a cleared desktop, I immediately thought - where has everything gone? Why is this empty? Decades later I still think it's cumbersome to have to look and press at bottom left to see all the programs every time.

[1] proportions and locations can be set

Also, a "sweep" button that quickly clears the desktop into a "desktop archive." I do that manually anyway with my own "sweep" folders. Every few months I delete and categorize within the sweep folder. Keeping the desktop clean and organized is the new frontier, especially as screens become smaller and people don't want to lose flow.

Verbose response, but what are your thoughts? Maybe use voice recognition that uses lip-reading through a camera to launch or modify?

Mice and keyboards are just so passe, right, but I wouldn't go so far as getting a brain chip? Maybe a spherical "touchball" that senses the pressure of each finger to move a cursor? Trackballs are too laborsome. I have my mouse on maximum sensitivity and acceleration anyway.

This is like porn for me :)

> [..] lovely [..] cute [..] ugly [..] naive...

First and foremost to me those screenshots are somewhat disappointing as they can't match my memories. NeXT, BeOS, Irix, OpenLook, SunOS, Arthur (imagine the diversity)... they were SO awesomely impressive at insanely high multi-sync CRT resolution.

Reality simply can't match the mind's eye, at least not for me.

Alleycat in CGA just hit me hard.

For the people that didn’t live through this time, lining these images up makes it obvious why those that did speak of how visually impressive the Amiga was.

Nothing beats a 40 year nostalgia in the morning!

Except missing that sock and falling down into the dog's path and understanding the concept of fighting like cats and dogs.

I just found out that the theme song is on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game)

I distinctly remember, and found, the NeWS (Network extensible windowing sisten), where you could develop with PostScript(TM) for application windows.

Over time much NeWS related stuff resurfaced, wheter are application binaries, sources (both application and the server itself) or documentation, so anyone could play with them on a real machine (Sun-3 or SPARC) or inside QEMU SPARC. I'm waiting for a copy of "Portable NeWS 1.0" to be recovered, to see how much different the sources are compared to the 1.1 version.

I also hope to see resurface binaries/sources of other server implementations, Sun Symbolic Programming Environment (which includes code originally developed at Schlumberger, including LispScript), the sources of the PdB compiler, CMU Andrew wm (although is not directly related, is the ancestor of this window system, from the same authors), and whatever is related to this system.

It would be interesting a revival like Interlisp.

Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system.

Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer". This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Most managers are not Steve Jobs.

> in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab

Pet peeve of mine in Windows where the line is at most one pixel now. They also took away the coloured distinction between title bars for the active window, so you don't know where keystrokes are going to go.

We also lost clearly identifiable buttons, loading bars (replaced with throbbers), status bars that tell you what you're hovering over and what the program is doing, stable UIs to develop muscle memory, etc.

But we did gain some nice things!

- Tabs.

- Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures.

- Document editors remembering unsaved changes.

- Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission.

- Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings.

- Easy syncing (if I open Spotify on any device I'll see the same playlists, my clipboard is shared between phone/desktop/notebook, Immich integrates local and remote media, etc).

- Program-specific URL protocols, so that you can click on a link and have it open in a separate program (like `steam://open/games`).

- Map widgets.

- Package managers/app stores that cleanly install and uninstall applications.

One of my biggest bugbears is losing the OK/Apply/Cancel concept with dialog boxes or settings windows. If I have a window with lots of settings that I want to experiment with then I've no problem with that setting taking effect immediately, but please give me the ability to back out all the changes I've tentatively made via a Cancel button.

I agree. There's something about those 80s and 90s interfaces with their visible affordances, grab points, etc., that just makes them instantly comprehensible. Many of them are also beautiful.

The absolute peak, for me, though are those early releases of MacOS X. Cheetah and Puma were both incredible, both in appearance, and in use. They looked incredible but they still had all the affordances and comprehensibility of earlier interfaces.

One thing that's also very noticeable to me: title bars are title bars and nothing else. It's just easy to grab windows and move them, resize them, etc. Nowadays I really struggle sometimes to find a place in (what should be) the titlebar to drag a window in many application.

We have lost indeed.

I still want alt+underlined letter for menus.

Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same.

I'm curious - how often do you use the scrollbar? For me, almost never (or only as an indication of progress through a document). I'm scrolling only with wheel or arrows or PgUp etc.

Perhaps though this is learned behaviour from scrollbars being tiny. I'd rather have the extra screen space. The scrollbar is usually a nuisance when I accidentally touch it (touchscreen) and the page jumps away.

Have you been unable to find a DE or a DE theme with that type of UI/UX? I haven't looked into it, since I don't have these issues and prefer a more modern look, but surely there must be options out there if that's what you want.

Just finding a drag able area of the window to reposition it is a huge pain.

He also got Parallax P/NeWS in his collection, which is super rare. I also wrote a person who has a SunDew QIC cassette, and another has various NeWS sources (including the portable REF tree of the 1.1 version). Unfortunately they haven't released them yet, because of the unknown copyright situation. Another person has the OpenWindows 1.0 binary tapes for Sun-3 and Sun-4, among other stuff.

https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/bagley-nottingham-tapes

For now we have the sources of NeWS 1.1 (and operators.h if you look more in depth) and X/NeWS 2.0. I also have the RBuss sources (an incomplete clone), but I have to ask the author if they can be put on the internet.

Have you checked the Don Hopkins archive yet?

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/

I'm sure someone reading this thread has UAE handy in order to contribute a screenshot of AmigaOS/Workbench 1.x.

Regarding Amiga screenshots, they've taken care to get the DigiPaint aspect ratios right, but the Workbench 2.04 screenshot is in a resolution that comes from an add-in graphics card rather than the Amiga's custom chips. It's a resolution Workbench wasn't graphically designed for, so it looked wrong in such a resolution at the time. If you double the screenshot's height, then everything (text, icons, window gadgets etc) looks right.

It would be more representative of the OS, and the era, to have a height-doubled "HiRes" screenshot, 640x200 or 640x256.

No Plan 9. Otherwise, resources like this might help studying how the interfaces of the past evolved (at least, on the surface).

The plan 9 interface has evolved quite a bit, but it's largely invisible in screenshots. The differences are in things like triple click behavior, jumps to insertion points, effective use of mouse cursor warping, chording.

I love this kind of thing :) I finally have a second site to bookmark alongside this similar collection: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots

Irix 5 was so clean!

Year of release for each would be extra awesome.

There's a lot of nostalgia in the comments here. I wonder if any reader under say 25 is willing to comment; do you think OS's today are a regression? do those look better?

To me they look unwieldy, heavy and overwhelming and I can't help but think the love for them is just the love for youth or whatever

Let's talk about the HP-9000 as depicted in http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/hpwindows-starbase-u...

> DECWindows

> /tmp/med_16.sixel

... Is that Sinfest? From before the author went weird? If so, then that's certainly a very different way of feeling old than I expected when clicking the link.

P.S.: There's another in "RiscOS 3.71", and "System V Release 4 Amiga Version 1.1" references Penny Arcade. [0]

[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/01/05/the-merch#

Speaking of the early 2000's, man, Aqua was such a good design. I appreciate the nextstep paradigm and design, but Aqua was just so futuristic, in a good way.

"We have learned nothing in 10,000 years."

Obligatory Link to xkcd [0]

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

ToastyTech is wonderful but don't forget GUIdebook, which also is.

https://guidebookgallery.org/

Or GS/OS for the Apple IIgs, the weird "not exactly Mac OS" GUI.

There is the 16-bit Geoworks Ensemble (PC/GEOS), at least.

Basing one's opinion on how a static screenshot looks, is the reason we've moved towards pretty looks and away from usability concerns.

As other commentors have said, the overriding concern with these older OSs was to make them as easy as possible to use. It would never have crossed these developers' minds to, for example, hide the scrollbar because they think it looks ugly.

Looking at a screenshot doesn't really tell you anything if you're not familiar with it, but it's a nice reminder of using that software for those who are.

In most of the comments here, I'm not seeing "nostalgia" or "the love for youth". I'm seeing frustration with how the carefully researched and developed principles have been forgotten.

There is definitely an element of nostalgia. However, a lot of earlier desktop OS GUIs do seem to be more internally consistent and with more emphasis on usability than the current crop. I think part of the issue is that things that might make sense on a phone have bled into desktop OSes, where they make a lot less sense.

I started with HP-UX 9.03 on a PA-RISC-powered 715-75 (to use Emacs, our whole research group logged into the 735 server to edit there, which was faster than running it locally).

Any unclean pointer fiddling in C, and the process was terminated by the OS, so the machine was wonderful to use as a development box (especially with Purify installed) for software that would later be run on Windows or Linux.

I eventually bought my own refurbished (and using academic discount) 715 (instead of a car), so I had the fastest machine in our student dorm of anyone I knew, undergrad, grad student or professor. I could just write my Master's thesis when everyone else kept re-installing Windows - the HP never crashed in 6.5 years, which has left me with deep respect for the old-schol (pre-Compaq) HP engineers. The machine (21" color CRT) occupied half of my 9 square metre dorm room, but it also kept me warm.

I thought only `info` had hyperlinks

My 'first Unix' was MIPS Risc/OS, and it had that feature too.

In some ways X11 with it's focus follows mouse, don't raise on focus, select:middle click paste features provide a far more refined desktop experience then mac or windows ever could. No wait, stop laughing, sure X11 was a garbage fire when it came to consistent professional design, but because it was such a wild west of an environment there was place for real ui innovation. I know, I get grumpy fast without middle click paste. And I hate having to raise a window in order to click and type on it(A common access pattern for me is to read docs on the top window while I am operating the bottom window).

Yes Aqua was quite striking. Also much more consistent than the rag bag of different styling you see on Windows or Mac today.

Even before those, AfterStep, Enlightenment and many others were really nice.

I don’t see any pie menus, so I’m leaning towards agreement...

Probably more accurately 40-45 years.