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The rise and fall of the standard user interface (www.theregister.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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IBM's SAA and CUA brought harmony to software design… until everyone forgot

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Old man yells at cloud.

I was involved in KDE during the 1.x to 2.0 transition period. Hell, it's when I got my commit rights. We had a mailing list called the KDE-HIG list -- human interface guidelines, to borrow from Apple's terminology. The SNR was terrible -- there were a bunch of people with great ideas (myself included), but very few of them were coding. So the list would endlessly debate things like consistent button orders in dialog boxes, but couldn't agree (most of the time), and since most of them weren't coding, they'd just continue to recycle the debate.

The coders, between KDE 1.x (which was very much a Win95 knockoff at the time, even poking fun at themselves and Microsoft in the process), consciously decided to allow KDE to evolve organically. Konsole got transparent backgrounds but the text editor did not, based on whatever people thought was cool. And it was cool! Hell, there were development forks where the branches had names like "make_it_kool". KDE was almost entirely volunteer run, unlike Gnome which had Redhat sponsored devs and such, so the lack of direction led to meritocracy, darwinism, and a great and welcoming sense of community. Alas, UI consistency suffered :)

Tangents: two specific jokes at Microsoft's expense.

In Win95, there was a slogan "Where do you want to go today?" that flew in on the taskbar and pointed at the Start Menu. When KDE 1.0 was out, it did the same thing, except it said "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" Haha, one-upmanship! It was dumb.

The first popular web browser was call Navigator (Netscape). Microsoft riffed on this with Internet Explorer. In KDE 2.0, the file manager/browser combo app was called Konqueror. It was like the progression of a 4X strategy game or something.

Minor irony. Konqueror created its own HTML rendering engine, KHTML. Which was forked by Apple to create WebKit for Safari. Which was forked by Google to create Chrome. Which is now the underlying engine in the modern Internet Explorer. Check your user agent string -- maybe KDE did konquer after all...