Gooey!

September 29, 2010 9:46 AM

Guidebook. The GUI gallery.

Yes, the site's been abandoned since 2006. Sure, there're others doing the same sort of thing. But this site is pure nerd porn.

posted by jtron (21 comments total)

Looks like it's that time of year to shed another tear for the loss of BeOS. It managed to do the "Half Mac, Half Unix" thing far better than OS X ever could, and was blindingly fast.

Operating systems today still haven't caught up.
posted by schmod at 9:50 AM on September 29, 2010

OS X changed so much from DP2 to DP4 (halfway down the page)
posted by Brainy at 9:58 AM on September 29, 2010

It's really, really hard to do a decent GUI. Be is remarkable in that it went toe-to-toe with the Mac for usability and refinement... even NeXT was clunky by comparison (and still sort of is, tho it looks prettier.)

On the Unix side, I had forgotten how elegant and awesome IRIX was, and Apollo looked really damn good for an '80s Unix platform.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:04 AM on September 29, 2010

Thank heavens those dreadful pinstripes are gone from OS X, as well as the almost as bad brushed metal look.
posted by Scoo at 10:07 AM on September 29, 2010

Oh man, GEM Desktop. The office software was buggy as hell but you could put PICTURES in your documents. This made it 500% better for writing adventures in elementary school than WordStar. I was still using that thing when we got Windows 3.1.
posted by charred husk at 10:08 AM on September 29, 2010

Site last updated on 6th October 2006:

Which is back when people stopped using 10px fonts.
posted by jsavimbi at 10:11 AM on September 29, 2010

Sniff...those were the days...broken metaphors, hours of questioning "why not the command line..."

Anyway, Google Images does seem to bring up better eye candy than this site does, sometimes.
posted by circular at 10:16 AM on September 29, 2010

Sweet nostalgia. I still miss MacOS 9.
posted by grouse at 10:17 AM on September 29, 2010

Sweet nostalgia. I still miss MacOS 9.

Anybody who ever had to use OS9 for more than an hour would never make that statement (because that's about how long OS9 would last before crashing and requiring a reboot)
posted by schmod at 10:33 AM on September 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

I miss the user interface, not the system stability. It was so cute and something about it gave me warm fuzzies.
posted by grouse at 10:34 AM on September 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Sweet nostalgia. I still miss MacOS 9.

Classic MacOS is still my favorite GUI environment. Maybe it's the number of years I put in on it, but I can boot up an old MacOS machine and in a short amount of time, feel completely at home in it, even if it's been years. It really was the bicycle for the mind.

I've had the Amstrad PCW16 in my bookmarks for sometime. I'll pull it up every once-and-a-while just to look at how well done a 1-bit can be. So pretty.
posted by bionic.junkie at 10:47 AM on September 29, 2010

Looking at the old Mac screenshots reminded me how much I miss Shufflepuck! Too bad I can't run the "Classic" environment on my machine.
posted by not_on_display at 11:28 AM on September 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

I actually liked the old OS/X pinstripes. Call me crazy. (Actually, don't. I have low self-esteem.)

Ah, there's Geos. It was more amazing that it worked at all than worked particularly well. The system had 64K of memory, yet had icons and everything. I heard it flew with RAM Expansion. Ultimately it was just a curiosity though.

Man, look at that "Channel Guide" right on the desktop in Windows 98. Remember "Push content?" Does anyone still offer channel content? Anyway, I'm so glad that Active Desktop nonsense died out eventually, although "Windows Gadgets" is the same thing in a slightly different form. (Actually, Channel Guide was more an IE4 thing, although it was included with Win98. I still remember the hype that surrounded IE4, they really pushed down the gas to the marketing department to push that and hasten the doom of Netscape. I think I still even have an IE4 install disk around here somewhere.)
posted by JHarris at 11:45 AM on September 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

I think I still even have an IE4 install disk around here somewhere.

Destroy.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 12:51 PM on September 29, 2010

Blackberry's still really into "push content." They even still call it by the same name.

_{Of course, this might be a better example of why RIM is bass-ackwards, rather than how push content didn't really die.}
posted by schmod at 1:00 PM on September 29, 2010

I think I still even have an IE4 install disk around here somewhere.

God, that's the modern equivalent of that guy who found an old civil war medical textbook with smallpox scabs inside it. Destroy destroy destroy.
posted by Riki tiki at 1:01 PM on September 29, 2010 [4 favorites]

I saw the "Gooey" title and was hoping this would be about delicious delicious geoducks.
posted by jabberjaw at 2:00 PM on September 29, 2010

Too bad I can't run the "Classic" environment on my machine.

Hey not_on_display -- Have you looked into Mini vMac? It's an emulator for Mac Plus that runs on OS X, Windows, flavors of Linux, and even the iPhone. I have a version that came with a virtual HD stuffed with tons of old games, but I can't find the link where I got it. If I do, I'll post a follow-up link.
posted by bionic.junkie at 4:01 PM on September 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Does anybody else thing GUIs without antialiasing look just... antique in this day and age?
posted by Sukiari at 5:06 PM on September 29, 2010

Oh sure, and in 20 years you'll be complaining how Mac OS Classic didn't have a neuro-interface.
posted by JHarris at 12:51 PM on September 30, 2010

An awesome trip down memory lane. It's really funny how our perception and expectation of UI's changes over the years, i can remember seeing some of those GUI's in their time and thinking how awesome, slick and high tech they looked.
posted by element[0] at 10:26 PM on September 30, 2010