Most beautiful GUI (OS 4, Windows 8, ...)?

[Sean Cunningham]

MacOS 9 would have to be my favorite, though System 7 is good too.  It's one of the few where you can tell they hired real graphic designers to do it up.  Something went wrong once NeXT took over at Apple.  Rhapsody, NeXT with OS9 window borders looked nice enough.  Aqua forward is a real let down with the ugliest window scaling gadget ever made, which doesn't fit the rest of the window look.  There are still pure NeXT bits still in there but the Aqua to brushed steel to whatever it is now has never really gel'd or ultimately felt like a cohesive design.  It also, even more than modern Windows, wastes vast quantities of pixels on nothing but blank space.  They're both the equivalent to those phones with giant number you buy for old people.  Still, I like it better than Windows.


(Rhapsody, best of both worlds MacOS + NeXT)

Most Amiga interfaces are hampered by non-uniform scaling issues from wonky, legacy pixel aspect ratios.  MorphOS is pretty nice looking and maybe one of the prettiest bitmap interfaces which gives it a throwback quality despite being a modern OS.

Most UNIX UIs, besides maybe Open Look, are just hideous and not terribly useful in any case, post-NEWS IRIX being one of the ugliest and clunkiest ever (NEWS, on pre-Indigo Irises was actually quite nice but the move to an X-Windows based UI killed performance while getting ugly at the same time) since Motif was just awful.  UNIX/Linix desktop environments are usually ignored as desktops anyhow and mostly you're determining what sort of bars and gadgets you're going to have on your shell windows.

[Sean Cunningham]

Windows 8 has the worst interface of them all.

Post X-Windows IRIX would beg to differ.  It was a pile while rendering machines that still had life left in them as useless.  Besides their being hitched to a processor series that just couldn't compete for much longer, lack of a good desktop environment was likely a factor in their losing the workstation market in less than ten years.

[Sean Cunningham]

@Sean Cunningham

gotta agree with you on the classic mac os. pound for pound it was the most beautiful, well-designed GUI out there. i miss it.

-- eliyahu

I don't miss how it liked to crash at the drop of a hat but I miss the way it looked and felt.  I recently booted up our old Cinewave-HD editor, a dual-1K Quicksilver G4 with OS9 on one of the boot partitions and it was neat seeing it for the first time in nearly ten years.  It also showed me just how wasteful modern UIs are of screen real estate.  It's so tight and compact.

[Sean Cunningham]

Umm Sean Cunningham SGI IRIX was better under XSGI - they fixed what was wrong with  X11 while maintaining a minimal compatibility level. I'd call that impressive. Plus its a lot like AmigaOS all in all - but im not gonna debate its merits. Too tired

Under NeWS the Personal Iris 4D 35TG was perfectly usable in 1992.  Simply "upgrading" it to the Motif based, non-Display Postscript GUI as well as additional bloat rendered these machines as doorstops (fuggetaboutit if you had a 4D25), using the same application software.  That OS required upgrading to Indigo Elan hardware, at the very least, to feel like you hadn't taken two steps backwards.  Their baseline Indigo graphics didn't even work properly with that initial release of the new OS (4.x).

SGI was only able to remain relevant for a few more years after this as a workstation vendor with both Intel and, for a period, DEC on their heals, catching up on speed and kicking their ass on price.  It was a sad state of affairs when folks had faster systems on their desks at home than what the company was still likely paying for sitting on desks at work.

Don't even get me started on their garbage toolkit that not only performed bad but looked bad no matter the hardware you were running it on.  It should come as no surprise no major applications used it, they mostly went straight at GL.  Not from Wavefront, Alias, SESI, TDI, Discrete, etc.  Maybe ASDG but their interface was a slug and their I/O even slower and it was tolerated simply because their shape warping was the best implementation that's ever been and once morphing had ceased to be vogue their software was still the best roto tool available for SGI, even though it was slow, because the roto splines in everything else were just that bad.  

Under the hood, yeah, IRIX was a solid OS.  The GUI sucked since they dumped NeWS though, sorry.  Maybe folks in academics never noticed.  In CG/VFX animation, it wasn't a pretty time.

[Sean Cunningham]

@ Sean Cunningham

I have a few SGI machines laying around, you are right IRIX's GUI should have been improved.

I would actually love, for a personal museum of sorts, to have an SGI 4D 35TG with the last version of IRIX they shipped with NeWS (v3.x) and the last version of Wavefront's The Advanced Visualizer along with SESI's Prisms and Photorealistic Renderman.

Prisms was the package that eventually became Houdini.  Great bit of trivia, Mark Elendt was an avid Amiga user and chief architect for Prisms.  He had a custom version of the then $20K+ software running on his personal Amiga.

[Sean Cunningham]

I have a poll to add after this one...

Which OS is more like AmigaOS?

1. BeOS
2. IRIX
3. AmigaOS

I never used BeOS, though I followed the early BeBox and considered getting one for a while.  IRIX was nothing like AmigaOS though.

The Amiga's desktop was actually useful as a desktop environment.  The "desktop" aspects of IRIX were mostly ignored and the the UI mostly a means to manage all the command shells you would generally have open.  You did everything from command shells.  Unlike the Amiga, or any flavor of Mac or Windows you could not actually "run" an IRIX machine from the GUI or really function in that environment.  They might be there with the most mainstream "pop" distro of Linux but I seriously doubt you could fully utilize or configure or even adequately launch major third party applications strictly from the desktop without the aid of a "high priest" previously creating the illusion that it was functional in that way.

After adding BSD-like tools to my Amiga, a good shell (CSH/TCSH for me) and various text/shell networking and communications tools I started using my Amiga at home more like how I used my SGI at work, but that's bending AmigaOS to work like just about any AT&T + BSD system rather than the two being inherently alike in any way.  It's essentially what I've done to just about every Windows system I've used since working with IRIX though you still have to contend with slashes going the wrong direction under Windows :angry:

At one point I think I even added a shell environment to MacOS 9 and was using some software for a while that made heavy use of TCL.  With the change to OSX it meant I could do everything from the shell like I would generally work on an IRIX or Linux system but it, like the Amiga, had a functionally useful desktop environment too.

[Sean Cunningham]

Slow like an Indigo, GTFO.  You're comparing two different eras of SGI.  The Fuel was introduced after SGI had already lost the workstation market, had been dying for years, a decade after the introduction of Motif and SGI's X-Windows based UI.  You're talking about what it is on one of the fastest desktop implementations they eventually built.  Assuming it would be possible, it's almost like a theoretical RTG high bit desktop on an A500 compared with a G5 FrankenAmiga.

My take is from actually living through the real implementation of this stuff as it happened, not through the rose colored glasses of vintage computing.  I used these when these were contemporary workstations and necessary for real work.  SGI 4D to Indigo to Indigo2 to Octane.  I had to actually try to get work done during the transition between 3.x and 4.x and there was a marked difference in performance on the same exact hardware between the two, putting aside aesthetic issues.  Using a post-21st Century model after multiple generations of proc revisions to pick up the slack and absorb the bloat isn't very convincing to me.  I was using machines that worked and could get real work done and then could not, requiring a new, at that time $90K upgrade to the new model to feel pretty much the same as before the new OS came out.

Still.  You could not setup or maintain these systems through the GUI or install and run high end software through the GUI.  No way.  That's what separates a real desktop from playtime with window adornments and icon packages.

[Sean Cunningham]

If someone actually thinks



...is somehow more attractive and elegant than



...I dunno.  That's just boggling.  It's like speaking a different language where "elegant", "bulky", "clunky", etc. all have entirely different meanings in our respective languages.

[Sean Cunningham]

I never had to use Solaris.  Our SysAdmin at Metrolight used a B&W Solaris box (Solbourne I think) to manage everything but I can't say I ever did more than a passing glance at it.  But I got about a year's exposure to SGI's implementation of the Sun interface on a variety of 4D hardware and it was simple and elegant and razor sharp.

Applications ignored the baseline UI anyway and always wrote their own, so it was generally just styling for your shell windows and after the first time you sat down in front of one you never ran the demo toys again or giveaway stuff that came bundled.  Then IRIX 4.x started to transition in, likely Summer-ish of '92 and everything changed.  If you didn't get a machine upgrade to one of the new Indigos you often found yourself working overtime so that you could hop on one after someone else had left for the evening, even though you were using the same software as always and now just felt half as productive after the OS change, because of the bloat.

X11 is a pig, no matter how you dress that pig up.  We've just increased resources and computing power to the point that its not as noticeable.  The antithesis of the "Amiga way" things should work, in point of fact.

edit: and though I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, another illustration of the difference in performance between pre and post X11 IRIX is the NeWS version, being Display Postscript, could move whole window contents redrawing them as a solid entity, like NeXT (and that was such a high performance windowing system it could do that on a 68K based system, without fancy accelerated graphics).  You couldn't do that with an X11 system at the time.  Maybe now.  I can only imagine the clearly visible fill-rate for an X11 implementation on a 68K based workstation.  68K SGI Irises just booted to a command prompt, no UI at all.

[Sean Cunningham]

I see what you mean Sean. Honestly I never leave IRIX or Solaris in its default GUI configuration...

And perhaps 6.x is a lot better.  By around 2001 I'd worked on my last IRIX box because the R10K was just too slow anymore.  The Quadro and Fire-GL cards in the mostly Intel boxes that replaced SGI at places like ILM, DD, Sony, Disney, Dreamworks, etc. weren't as good as the graphics subsystems available from SGI, not even close, but the days of $90K, $75K, $55K and even $25K workstations were over and SGI just weren't able to keep up in that sector, ironically falling victim to PC technology the same way SGI killed the mini and took a major bite out of mainframe and supercomputer markets not quite 20 years prior.

That's something I don't get, because losing so many customers all at once put them in a major bind there for a while, so much so they had to sell off Alias|Wavefront even though Maya was an industry standard.  They should have become a major player in the graphics accelerator market and killed Nvidia and ATI at the professional level, since they never could be bothered to do pro level drivers.

[Sean Cunningham]

You really shouldn't go off your meds.

[Sean Cunningham]

Other.  C64 GEOS for me.  

Hah-hah, I used this in high school before I got my Amiga.  And I had one of those crap thermal printers.  When I printed out reports I was essentially giving my teacher "scrolls", lol.

[Sean Cunningham]

There's, apparently, folks still using NT.

I never was a fan of XP.  I had a nasty situation where after installing a high end Soundblaster the driver would, over a period of less than a day, cause the OS to eat and corrupt itself.  I couldn't believe that one.

[Sean Cunningham]

I don't doubt it.  But I lost a lot of time and all confidence in that OS so I was glad to be rid of those boxes eventually.  I couldn't install anything new without feeling like it was going to get the cancer again.  Of course, I'll never buy another product from the makers of the Sound Blaster either.  They were totally unhelpful and uninterested once I discovered the problem with my gold plated suppository.

[Sean Cunningham]

See, that's nice.  I don't know WTF people are thinking saying Motif is anything but the fat, uncoordinated kid at this schindig.  4DWM was born looking old, fat and kludgy by comparison.  That actually has appeal.

Which WM is that, BTW?  It doesn't look like NeWS, unless their's is just wildly different than 4Sight.