@kenshirriff /subscribe

@synack Thanks! I might have it somewhere! But that’s of course not real ha

@raineer Especially when they started redefining the characters, they hacked the bright colors as background, and did the fake graphic mouse pointer!

Some of these are stark but maybe kinda beautiful – especially if you pair them with some of the nicer PC fonts?

@SnoopJ Very WarGames

@ranjit Wow! TIL

@colinstu I’m vibing more with early GEOS – I think the later you go the uglier it gets…

I mean look at this stuff!

This, or IBM 2260 also had this wild-looking font.

I think Psion was very nice, too.

@Screwtapello Yeah, @nina_kali_nina was just exploring one of them. That’d be a goldmine!

@dokas Seems like it!

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.

@kickingvegas GEOS on C64 was also very elegant!

@kickingvegas I resurrected some PC/GEOS pixel fonts and use them on my site! https://aresluna.org

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?

I was just looking at Scala on Amiga and look how beautiful!

(Source + kudos to Stone Tools: https://stonetools.ghost.io/scala-amiga)

@scottjenson I’d love to see a celebration of more utilitarian kind of stuff. The most beautiful DOS apps, for example. Or particularly nice early Mac apps before the conventions solidified.

@vga256 Oh, so interesting! I think this is both exactly what I was curious about, and exactly the opposite – this probably has a lot of flashy weird “agency” kind of stuff that I hate, rather than everyday UI worth celebrating. But I just snagged a used copy.

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.