The DOS screenshots are reflective of the PC video hardware of the time. Text mode had a fixed 16-color palette [0] at best, the IBM font including graphics characters was preset, while the aspect ratio of the characters wasn’t fixed (the screenshots in the article are 80x25, but I used 80x40 or 80x50, with correspondingly more quadratic text cells). However, the screenshots aren’t quite representative of how things looked on a CRT monitor, however; it looked more vibrant and organic, if that makes sense.
Personally I didn’t find Windows visually pleasing before Windows 95, but much of that can again be attributed to the PC video hardware limitations of the time.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I worked with DOS in… WordPerfect? I don’t remember for sure which word processing application it was. But I honestly don’t remember ever seeing anything remotely “graphic“ in my DOS days.
WordPerfect 6 had a full GUI mode with a very vaguely Win3-like GUI implemented in DOS.
Borland Quattro Pro had one too.
Microsoft Word could be flipped in and out of it: in it, you got WYSIWYG bold, italic, underline etc, and more lines on screen, but otherwise the UI remained much the same.
PowerQuest imitated Win95 so well in PartitionMagic it was pixel-perfect.
It was entirely a thing in the late DOS era. It let DOS apps look competitive, and yet demand far lower system requirements and run on much older machines than one needed for Windows.
Are you sure? Your earlier comments expressed uncertainty if it was WordPerfect at all.
WordPerfect on the PC was a very niche app before version 4.2 which was the big hit. I knew a tiny handful of places that had copies of the older version but they weren't running it.
It is on the edge of before my time -- I started my first job in late 1988 -- but before WP 4.2, WordStar still dominated, with some specialist users running DisplayWrite or MultiMate. I'm not American and I think the US market was different with shareware taken slightly more seriously, so more presence of PC Write, and maybe XyWrite or other tools little seen in the British Isles.
IE4 built in so Microsoft didn't get broken up my the US DOJ. Explorer rendered local content via HTML. Ugly extra toolbars. Some floating, some embedded in the task bar. Ugly gradients and blends in window title bars.
Cheap and plastic and tacky.
But that is around the time that media and gaming PCs went mainstream, home internet use (often over dialup) went mainstream, and the alternatives died out (Amiga, ST & GEM, Arm & RISC OS) or very nearly died (classic MacOS, NeXT merger, Rhapsody).
So it's what many saw first and loved and remembered.
Result, people write entire new OSes designed in affectionate homage:
KDE started out as a reproduction of Windows 98/98SE by a team who didn't realise that what they were looking at was WordPerfect 5.x instead of WordPerfect 4.x -- as the late great Guy Kewney put it:
"WordPerfect 4.2 was a bicycle. A great bicycle. Everyone agreed it was a great bicycle, just about the best. So what Wordperfect did was, they put together a committee, looked at the market, and said: 'what we'll do is, we'll put 11 more wheels on it'."
Win98 is Win95 festooned with pointless needless Internet widgetry because the DOJ was about to split MS into separate apps and OS companies, because MS drove Netscape into bankruptcy by bundling IE free of charge with Windows.
Strip all that junk off and what's left underneath is a better UI. But the German kids writing their "Kool Desktop Environment" didn't realise.
After that came WinME and Windows 2000, which turned down the bling a bit as the lawsuit was over, but it was only a blip.
Then came XP with its "Fischer-Price" themes.
Then Vista with gratuitous transparency everywhere because GDI.EXE had been ripped out and replaced with a compositor and that's no fun if you don't use some 3D features like see-through stuff.
Then 7 toned that down a bit and everyone love it.
Then the universally detested Win8, and then that was toned down and the Start menu put back for Win10, which is roughly what UKUI and Deepin copied in China, or Wubuntu in the West.
Then Win11, as copied by AnduinOS and a few others, which for this long-term Windows user is the worst release ever. I can't even have a vertical taskbar any more. It's abhorrent.
