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Socket 3
Personal blog · socket3.wordpress.comhistoryhardware
Socket 3 is a personal blog at socket3.wordpress.com about history and hardware. Since 2017, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “Designing Windows 95’s User Interface”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Socket 3 is a blog on Windows 95 interface design, centred on its 2018 post 'Designing Windows 95's User Interface'. HN readers link it as an account of the UI team's design goals and usability testing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Home page.
Most-linked posts?
- Designing Windows 95’s User Interface21 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2018-02-07
What Hacker News says?
Now let's go back from this flat UI nonsense everywhere to the kind of solid look that Windows '95 had and make my decade, not just day! https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls”Submitted Designing Windows 95’s User Interface as a story · 568 points
HN discussionI've been designing a complex desktop application.. there's not that much info out there. I found these helpful: Designing the Win95: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9... Also the final design guides: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M... A (really old) book: https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Des... Another book: https://www.amazon.com/Desig…
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Audacity 3.0”Submitted Designing Windows 95's User Interface (2018) as a story · 274 points
HN discussionI'm sure you've seen this or similar paper before, but a good refresher from the windows 95 team: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “SerenityOS demo at Handmade Seattle 2021 [video]”Submitted Designing Windows 95’S User Interface as a story · 29 points
HN discussionYes! That's what I mean. It's like Win95 put a lot of effort into that GUI. There was a PDF on HN long ago about the Win95 research project. I found this, but it's not what I recall (I remember a loooong PDF): https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Windows 96”Submitted Install and Configure IBM OS/2 Warp 4.52 Using Oracle VirtualBox as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThere was a lot of focus on making things usable by a computer novice, which many customers at the time were: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Windows 96”Submitted Inspired by Atari: Microsoft Arcade as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe following link has been posted here before but is an excellent dive into the 95 UI for those looking for more to read: Designing Windows 95's User Interface (2018) https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Windows 95 UI Design”Submitted Designing Windows 95’s User Interface as a story · 2 points
HN discussionErmm...no. I would say Microsoft's UI team was absolutely stellar and basically the gold-standard in the world during Windows 95 days. I think you need to open your mind a little bit and read: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9... This is debatable but personally, 2009 Windows 7 UX/UI is still better than 2022 versions of GNOME, KDE, XFCE what-have-you in the Linux world. If anything, compl…
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “The Windows 11 taskbar is an annoying step backward”Submitted Visual Basic: Early Beginnings as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study. Windows 95 significantly overhauled the desktop GUI metaphor, in a way that is still the skeletal structure of desktops today. Its U/I design since Windows 3.11 came about because of agile, not…
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “No more icons in every menu by default”Submitted My 'ultimate' 486 build revisited (2018) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAFAIK, Windows 95 was the last UI design with a published design methodology that includes numerous laboratory test sessions. I'm not sure the original URL, but it was republished [1]. It's listed at ACM [2] as published April 1996, so they were sharing how they did it pretty soon after it was done. I just don't think Microsoft continued to do lab testing of their design, at least they haven't told us that they did,…
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Make Linux look like Windows 95”Submitted Designing Windows 95’s User Interface – Socket 3 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf anything, they had a better idea what they were doing than people do now. Windows 95 is a case study in good design. They got there by testing it and iterating on it a ton. https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “A time in 1994 when Steve Jobs got to use a device like an iPhone”Submitted Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThey didn't start from "everything is in the Start menu" for no reason. The initial Windows 95 design had different buttons for different functionality. They ended up combining the buttons into a single "Start" button because during user testing, they saw that users found multiple buttons hard to use. They had to learn which button did what, and it was often confusing because sometimes the functionality overlapped b…
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible”There's a good paper here on the (95) UI team's design goals and how they were achieved: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Why does part of the Windows 98 Setup program look older than the rest? (2020)”Worth reading the comments - as the original author of the paper Kent Sullivan chimes in: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Designing Windows 95's User Interface (2018)”> There is a huge blindspot, I've noticed, where people mistake familiarity for ease of use (and other qualities too). The "legacy" Windows design isn't just so beloved because of familiarity, but because it actually provides visual cues to users [1], and the backstory on how it was designed is also interesting [2]. I know that there was an even more detailed article floating around here on HN but I can't find it of…
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Linux hits nearly 4% desktop user share on Statcounter”why "directories" were renamed to "folders" I was just reading about that today. Alan Kay is to blame it seems, as for so much. :-) "The desktop metaphor was first introduced by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1970 and elaborated in a series of innovative software applications developed by PARC scientists throughout the ensuing decade. The first computer to use an early version of the desktop metaphor was the experimental…
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “The Missing Computer Skills of High School Students”Thanks! Interestingly, Motif was based on Windows 3.x look, more precisely "Presentation Manager" look designed for OS/2 and Windows. You can see the similarities in how resize corners and close buttons etc are laid out on windows. Windows 95 was a phenomenal success IMHO in terms of UI design, and it was partly based on Cairo which got a lot of inspiration from NextSTEP, but Win95 became so widespread that it becam…
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “A Windows 95-like shell for Windows 3.1x”Because back then usability was in focus: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9... There is also a Twitter thread that notes what got lost over time - especially separation and contrast. https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “There are at least 10 different Microsoft design conventions in Windows 11”This theme really rocks. I've used it for quite some time. I still miss some gotchas from Windows 95 UX (1 pixel width things, no overuse of shadows/highlights, concise color pallette, etc), and started to respect it even more after reading this article: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “Internet Explorer Is Evil (2002)”Windows NT 3.1 seems to have come with a CD, a complete installation set of 3.5" discs, and even boot discs for the CD on 5.25" discs (and a voucher for a 5.25" complete set). So Microsoft obviously thought 3.5" discs were often going to be needed back in 1993 (and there's a notable number of people that have a CD-ROM drive, but no 3.5" drive?). See https://socket3.wordpress.com/2016/12/24/ebay-purchase-5-mic... Fra…
Comment linking /2016/12/24/ebay-purchase-5-microsoft-windows-nt-3-1/
on “Windows is the strangest, or hardest, operating system to keep curl support for”Circa Win95 - Win2000 windows always reminded me of NeXTSTEP windows, and I wonder if that's where Microsoft got it's inspiration. Edit: Here's a mirror of a document that purports to be from a Windows 95 design team member: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9... Edit2: And a Hanselman podcast episode with Kent Sullivan and Derek Hoiem: https://hanselminutes.com/628/a-history-of-the-windows-…
Comment linking /2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
on “A KDE Plasma theme that aims to replicate the look and feel of Windows 7”
