So there are coffee table books with beautiful photos of Braun equipment, Apple computers, collections of corporate brand standards, typeface specimens etc.
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@mwichary any Breadbox Ensemble love?
http://toastytech.com/guis/bbe.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)
@colinstu I’m vibing more with early GEOS – I think the later you go the uglier it gets…
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I mean look at this stuff!
This, or IBM 2260 also had this wild-looking font.
@mwichary vectors!
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I mean look at this stuff!
This, or IBM 2260 also had this wild-looking font.
@mwichary WOW, what a photo
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Early NeXT, obviously (a bit Unixy, but has some elegance)! Magic Cap?
There are probably some more strange and beautiful text-only DOS apps. Some particularly memorable semigraphics.
@mwichary SGI

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@mwichary depending on the flavor of the book there may be a page or two dedicated to Kai's Power Tools (Bryce3D in particular sticks strongly in my mind)
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@ranjit Wow! TIL
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@SnoopJ Very WarGames
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I mean look at this stuff!
This, or IBM 2260 also had this wild-looking font.
Reminds me of the Tektronix 4010s and 4014s we used to use. Vectors and persistent phosphor for the win.
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I mean look at this stuff!
This, or IBM 2260 also had this wild-looking font.
Some of these are stark but maybe kinda beautiful – especially if you pair them with some of the nicer PC fonts?
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Some of these are stark but maybe kinda beautiful – especially if you pair them with some of the nicer PC fonts?
@mwichary speed disk and Norton disk doctor (those were the days…) were the absolutely epitome of TUI to 15yo me
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So there are coffee table books with beautiful photos of Braun equipment, Apple computers, collections of corporate brand standards, typeface specimens etc.
But outside of some nostalgic video game coffee table books, have their ever been coffee table books showing primarily software? Graphical user interfaces or apps?
The closest I can think of is the macOS/iOS app icon book (by Michael Flarup), but that’s specific to icons.
@mwichary https://www.amazon.com/Make-So-Interaction-Lessons-Science/dp/1933820985/
It's not exactly coffee table sized, but has a bunch of photos of UI from scifi movies.
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@mwichary speed disk and Norton disk doctor (those were the days…) were the absolutely epitome of TUI to 15yo me
@raineer Especially when they started redefining the characters, they hacked the bright colors as background, and did the fake graphic mouse pointer!
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@mwichary https://www.amazon.com/Make-So-Interaction-Lessons-Science/dp/1933820985/
It's not exactly coffee table sized, but has a bunch of photos of UI from scifi movies.
@synack Thanks! I might have it somewhere! But that’s of course not real ha
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In my head, I can see a beautiful 17"x11" spread with a hypothetical Windows 3.11 CRT that’s 3000x2000 and it has a lot of windows, icons, Minesweeper, the goods. Especially the later “platinum” Windows 3.11 appearance.
You know? Stuff like that.
Early skeuomorphic iOS, early webOS, various Mac things of course, BeOS, the later Norton Utilities aesthetic, XCopy on the Amiga! TOS was always so elegant. And some lesser-known things. Newton?
@mwichary is it too early to place a preorder?

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