YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11

44 points enlyth 1 hour ago 15 comments

mijowi 36 minutes ago | parent

I often think old GUIs have a nice, functional look to them. This one is no exception. I notice (what I assume is) the shuffle toggle looks unfamiliar. This is from way back before that UI became a convention! I see the repeat icon has stuck around. So interesting!

elxr 28 minutes ago | parent

Functionality isn't hidden and buttons looked like buttons (instead of the modern trend of having unstyled text or tiny icons having a 50-50 chance of being a button).

weinzierl 15 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft (and Apple) poured a ton of money into usability research in the early 90s and it showed. I vaguely remember the story through how many versions of the trash icon Microsoft went for Windows 95 to get it right.

For me it was a bit sad to see the mad and creative UX world of the homecomputer era being bulldozed over with the minimalist uniform results of the scientific usability research.

Little did I know that a mere quarter century later we are back were we once started and everyone as clueless as we were in the 90s goes overboard everywhere as if there was no tomorrow.

Yeah, and it sadly makes me miss the nicely ordered and easily usable world - I'm gettin' old I guess.

bluedino 4 minutes ago | parent

There are a couple versions of the Windows CD player here (along with other operating systems)

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/cdplayer/

I always liked the look of the more complicated ones like this:

https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2021-09-29-media-rack-download-win...

xacky 22 minutes ago | parent

There's probably an old X11 app from the 1980s that could be executed through xwayland somewhere.

layer8 10 minutes ago | parent

As an unmodified binary from the 1980s on current Linux/Unix? Highly unlikely.

jpablo 9 minutes ago | parent

I can't even run a binary from one Linux distro to the other, let alone one from a random Unix from the 80s. If a rebuild from source is allowed (which would need to allow modifications to the build system) that's a completely different game.

dofm 18 minutes ago | parent

> At the time of this post, that’s a 33 years and 8 months old application,

Pointing this out without a trigger warning is just rude ;-)

Some of us are older than we think, yo.

jmclnx 16 minutes ago | parent

Interesting.

At one tine, Slackware Linux would not recompile binaries unless the program was patched. So there was a time you could find rather old binaries on Slackware, and maybe still on other distros.

I wonder what the oldest unchanged source/program running on Linux or BSD ? My vote goes to cat(1) :)

drnick1 13 minutes ago | parent

I deplore the day we lost the menu bar and replaced it with "mobile first" designs. The desktop UI was perfected around the time of Windows 95 and has gotten worse with every iteration since then. That, and the increased reliance on non-native frameworks and libraries instead of working with directly with the Windows API in C.

capnjngl 4 minutes ago | parent

Speaking of FreeCell, a couple weeks ago I was visiting my 95yr-old grandmother and noticed she still plays oldschool FreeCell, specifically a variant that's really hard to track down now called FreeCell Pro [https://cards.fandom.com/wiki/FreeCell_Pro]

It inspired a weekend project. I always liked that you could swap the card backs in OG FreeCell and play with different "themed" decks, so I vibecoded something a little more modern. I got carried away and added a roguelite mode too (yeah I know how "Roguelite FreeCell" sounds). Anyway, it's free to play on the web, no ads: [https://freecellworlds.com/]