9 thoughts on “Iterating the design of the Windows 95 user interface. Interestingly Visual Basic was used for prototyping.”
The VB prototyping would kind of explain why so many dialogs that are basically lists can’t be resized from the ludicrously small default. VB at the time made it unreasonably hard to implement resizable windows.
Peter da Silva I don’t remember the version of VB out at the time. I was programming in Turbo PASCAL in the mid 90s. I jumped into VB6 not long after, and I remember it was really tedious to do resizing, but not super difficult. Other than saying, “WTF are twips?” when I started.
John Hardy Turnbull delenda est: I think the one I got my hands on made a point of not calling itself VGA, super or otherwise, and the driver claimed it was an “universal VESA” one.
The VB prototyping would kind of explain why so many dialogs that are basically lists can’t be resized from the ludicrously small default. VB at the time made it unreasonably hard to implement resizable windows.
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Peter da Silva I don’t remember the version of VB out at the time. I was programming in Turbo PASCAL in the mid 90s. I jumped into VB6 not long after, and I remember it was really tedious to do resizing, but not super difficult. Other than saying, “WTF are twips?” when I started.
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“Really tedious”, “unreasonably hard”… six of one, half a dozen of the other. I could always tell VB apps by the lousy UI details like that.
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Peter da Silva Very true. I used to get annoyed by that. “Why bother giving me the resize handle if you didn’t bother tying it together?”
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Who needs resizing when you’ve got 640 pixels of width the play with😁
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John Hardy Turnbull delenda est: With a proper driver and a set of expensive hardware, Windows could do 800×600 pixels at the time already.
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Those were Super VGAs!
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Neat! This design methodology seems super ahead of its time.
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John Hardy Turnbull delenda est: I think the one I got my hands on made a point of not calling itself VGA, super or otherwise, and the driver claimed it was an “universal VESA” one.
It was not universal, of course.
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