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2026-06-16
I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I'm mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
Table of contents:
Tour of the UI
Some of the following will sound absolutely trivial, but I think it's worth pointing out.
On the first successful boot of Windows 2000, you get to see this:
(Yes, I have the German version. It doesn't matter much for the sake of this blog post.)
We will talk more about that dialog later, but for now, here's what we have:
- A non-distracting clean solid background color.
- Some labelled icons on the desktop.
- The taskbar with the "Start" button, some quicklaunch icons, some systray icons, and the clock.
- Clear, crisp font rendering. (This looked a lot smoother on a CRT monitor but it was still pretty good.)
Since that button down there is called "Start", it implies that you can probably do something with it, maybe start programs? Click and you'll see the Start Menu:
Notice how the Start button now changed its representation: It's "sunken" now, just like pressing a real button. This indicates that it's activated. A button is something that you've most certainly come across in real life before, like the button for turning on the PC, so you are very familiar with that concept.
Notice how the little arrows tell you that some menu items are probably different. Hovering over them opens another menu (you can click, but you don't need to). Hovering over items without such an arrow shows a tooltip, a little help text that tells you what this does.
Notice how the display of the Start menu visually represents its tree structure. It's not like some parts open in place, which would force you to remember where you came from. Instead, the path to the current item is shown clearly.
The icons are colored and quite different from one another. And, yes, there are icons. Icons are a shortcut for your brain: Reading text is harder than grasping the rough shape and color of an icon, so they help you find the item you're looking for.
Open the Windows Explorer:
Okay, I'm not a big fan of this default view. (While we're at it: Hiding filename extensions was one of the capital sins in computer history, if you ask me.) At least you could change it to this:
A tidy table on the right showing directories first, then files. The icons indicate the file type and this is consistent across the OS. The tree on the left allows for quick and easy navigation -- it's mostly clean and not cluttered with "Libraries" or "Places" or other virtual folders that don't really exist. The Explorer of Windows 95 was a little better in this regard, though, see below.
Let's take a look at a random application of the base system, like WordPad:
Notice how (almost) everything that you can interact with is clearly identified: It's either shown as some kind of button or handle, or it uses white background (or blue if it's already selected), which sets it apart from the slightly orange tinted gray of the rest of the window. This isn't immediately clear (why and how would some colors behave differently?), but as soon as you found it out, you'll remember it and this pattern is everywhere.
And notice that these colors are not just some shades away from each other. They are clearly different. At the same time, the whole color scheme is very well balanced: It's not glaringly white, it's not pitch black, the colors aren't too close to each other -- it's just the right amount of contrast.
WordPad is essentially the same as in Windows 95, though. If this was a program made for Windows 2000, it would look a little different.
Let's open some other random thing, like the desktop settings:
Again, the same consistent UI style, the same consistent visual clues. For example, the tabs at the top of this dialog also have that 3D relief effect, so it's safe to assume that you can click on them as well.
In all the screenshots above, notice how scrollbars are always visible if an area is scrollable. For example:
Every scrollbar is always visible -- they don't get hidden to "safe space" (even at a time when 800x600 screens were still pretty normal). And that's how you always knew: "Aha, I can scroll here!"
See that area in the middle? This one:
If there was no scrollbar, you might rightfully assume that this is the entire content of that pane. Nope, it can scroll, and there's no doubt about it -- you can immediately see that without having to hover or click anywhere:
Global program options followed a predictable pattern -- you get a new window with tabs:
Notice how, even inside of one tab, options that belong together are grouped in a "frame" and that's immediately clear to the user:
Compare that to contemporary settings dialogs which look more like this -- you can only tell which options belong together by comparing font sizes:
Let's look at the performance real quick:
It's a little bit sluggish, isn't it? And takes quite a bit of time to boot, right? It's certainly usable, though, not worse than your average website these days. I intend to use this setup for next Advent of Code.
But here's the kicker: This is Windows 2000 SP4 running on a Pentium 133 with 64 MB of RAM and a spinning harddisk, because that just happens to be the only "old" PC that I still have -- and these are quite literally the minimum requirements:
Run this on a Pentium 2 or 3 (the latter hit the market in 1999), and it flies. The Pentium 133 was already around 4-5 years old when Windows 2000 was released -- and that was a really long time in that era.
-- edit: I just found some old records of mine: On 1999-12-06, I indeed bought a Pentium 3 with 500 MHz and initially 64 MB RAM, upgraded to 128 MB on 2000-10-16. That is a much more realistic machine for Windows 2000. One reader has noted that there was this blog post on jmmv.dev a while ago where the person ran it on an AMD K7-600, which was somewhat comparably to my P3: It's super snappy.
Of course, getting good performance on slow systems means taking a close look and sometimes making sacrifices.
Windows 2000 also predates Product Activation: It runs entirely offline and you can still use it today, no questions asked. If we're resorting to using proprietary software, then this is the only acceptable way.
So, what we have is a pretty fast OS with an NT kernel, a pretty clear and concise UI, and it's a product that you bought (not a subscription).
Since this era, we saw a steady change in UI style. You can see the first signs of it in the "Welcome" dialog we saw at the beginning:
Notice how "Jetzt registrieren" ("Register now") or "Windows entdecken" ("Discover Windows") do not use 3D reliefs? It's just text? Notice how "Beenden" ("Close") is not really a button, it's already flat? In retrospect, these are clear signs of "The New Style". You can only tell that "Jetzt registrieren" is probably interactive because of the underlined "J", which usually indicates an accelerator hotkey and those only exist on interactive elements.
Or compare the toolbar of the Explorer from Windows 2000 with that from Windows 95:
In Windows 95, those toolbar icons were still actual buttons. In Windows 2000, they are recognizable as a button when activated, but in their default state they're not and you have to hover over them:
This trend of slowly removing visual clues continued and, today, you have no idea anymore which elements on the screen might be interactive.
I had this conversation a while ago:
- Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen."
- Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?"
The entire idea of having clear, consistent visual clues is lost. Nobody but old tech people even expects that anymore.
I wish we wouldn't shy away so much from bevels, reliefs, lines, and frames, just because those "scream Windows 95".
Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark ✔️ on paper is something that I actually do:
And there are lots of buttons and knobs near me. Real, physical ones, so they would be great to use as a UI metaphor.
Regarding the "Start" button
Readers have questioned whether the "Start" menu was really that obvious to new users. For example, Microsoft felt the need to add that little animation: On startup, a little arrow pointing at the "Start" button would come in from the right end of the taskbar and moving towards said button, I think it bounced a little bit, and some text said something like "Click here to begin". I couldn't reproduce this in my Windows 95 VM, but it looked something like this (with a graphical arrow, though, and it was an animation):
(You're supposed to be able to enable/disable this in TweakUI, but this checkbox would always revert to "unchecked" for me.)
So, yeah, even Microsoft was not 100% certain that the "Start" button would be self-explanatory? But hey, at least they added this animation as an extra guidance.
Personally, I do remember this animation as well -- although I remember it from being somewhat unreliable, because it sometimes showed up and sometimes it didn't.
As for the "Start" button itself, well, I had read about this new thing called "the Start menu" in magazines long before I ever saw Windows 95 in person, so I can't tell if I had understood it "intuitively" or not.
Oh yeah, this was clearly an anti-feature. Windows would hide some elements from the Start menu if you haven't used them in a while. This was one of the first things I turned off. I wanted to organize the menu the way I liked it.
You might even classify this as another early sign of the UI getting worse: Algorithms trying to be smart but failing at it, eventually (not in Win2k yet) being always enabled and thus taking control away from the user.
Quoting in full:
Notice how (almost) everything that you can interact with is clearly identified: It's either shown as some kind of button or handle, or it uses white background (or blue if it's already selected), which sets it apart from the slightly orange tinted gray of the rest of the window
Much more than that. It used the 3D imitation to great effect. There was a flat layer that contained anything informational that you couldn't interact with and anything you could was bevelled to appear 3D. Buttons and button-like objects that performed an action when you clicked on them or dragged them stood out towards you. Radio buttons, text fields, checkboxes, and anything that you put data in sank back like a hole that you could fill with something.
No one using the UI needed to think about this because, once you'd seen it a couple of times, it would register subconsciously.
Look at the WordPad screenshot:
- The main text area is sunk back. You type in here.
- The toolbar icons are raised, you press them.
- The indent indicator is raised. You can click / drag them.
- The ruler is sunk back, you can click there to add tab stops.
The last one is the most important. Most of the others are reusable UI elements that you'll see elsewhere, but the sunk-back effect on the ruler makes it immediately obvious that it's something you can interact with and not just a page-size indicator.
Later MS UIs lost most of these things.
The core UI elements were similar on contemporary MacOS but a few of the things on top were better, especially:
- Direct manipulation was the norm, drag and drop worked much more reliably. This included the file proxies in the title bar of document windows: you could grab the file and put it somewhere (e.g. print to a specific printer by just dragging the file proxy from the title bar of the window onto the right printer).
- Dialog boxes consistently had the go-back button on the left and the co-forward button on the right.
- Dialog boxes had verbs on the buttons, not okay / cancel.
Regarding Android "sliders" and light switches
People were surprised that there are no real-life objects here that resemble those Android sliders:
I'm as surprised as you are -- are these things more common in other countries? Huh.
Apparently, the GTK4 "Switch" was inspired by "light switches", and this thing looks just like an Android slider. I walked around my apartment and looked for all switches and toggles that I could find. Around here (in Europe), pretty much all light switches look something like this:
A light switch on a dedicated lamp looks like this:
The power switch on my printers (Oki Microline 3390, Epson AcuLaser C1100N) looks similar:
Really, the closest thing to an Android slider is ... my toaster:
Or the "power slide" on my netbook (from 2011) -- but this one doesn't stay in place once activated, it always slides back to a neutral position (it's a really weird thing and not very common at all):
Oh, wait, there are faders on my Darkglass Microtubes X7 bass pedal:
Those don't act like an Android slider, though. They give you a smooth transition from one extreme end to another -- they aren't binary switches.
Ah! Now I finally found something! A snowman christmas decoration thingie. To turn this on or off, you use an Android-like slider:
Phew!
I've been told that light switches in the USA look more like this (photos from the Wikipedia article on light switches, public domain, reduced file size) -- those at least somewhat resemble the UI elements:
Another reader hinted at vintage amplifiers which sometimes do indeed have toggles that look a lot like the UI elements. (In our household, flat toggles like the one from the Yamaha CA-1000 were more common. But even those were similar, yes.)
tl;dr: Okay, yes, I see now that there are real-life objects that resemble UI sliders. They're just very rare in my life.