Many years ago I had a 486-based notebook. The machine was running
Windows 95 most of the time as for simple internet-related tasks and
notetaking it was still a sufficient OS even few years after the
start of new millenium. Still I wasn't happy with the look of W95
gui. I quite hated the Start menu, because it was simply too much of
a hassle to go through the subfolder tree to find the few apps I
used.
Then I found copy of Windows NT 3.5 install media somewhere online
and replaced W95 with it. The "old" GUI of Windows 3.x was in my
opinion much better, the so-called Program Manager much faster to
run about anything and the concept of "non-object" desktop is
something I still like even today. You have just minimized running
tasks on your desktop and program/file management is just one of
these tasks, not something deeply integrated in your desktop.
Some years ago I found out, that what I thought was an Unix concept
of desktop, in fact really originated in Windows 3.x and was simply
considered as very effective idea and used in the process of
Unix GUI standardization in the first half of 1990's.
Let's skip to yesterday. I needed to test some webpage in ancient
version of Netscape Navigator and as all my computers from this era
are stored in the closet and I didn't want to go through the
upacking process for this simple task, so I decided to do it in some
emulator. I wasn't successfull with SheepShaver (what a buggy-crashy
piece of software that is!) so I started VirtualPC 7 on my PowerMac
and installed Windows NT 4.
I can still remember how I hated this desktop and avoided it
whenever possible. Windows95-like interface was the reason I started
to use Linux back in the 90's and discovered Mac and other
alternative computing platforms. And guess what? Today I found it
pretty usable. Yes, it's still the same Start-centric piece of
horror, but other desktop environments evolved in the past twenty
years into even worse nightmares. In Windows itself is now everything
at least two or three mouse clicks further from the user and for
example the process of network configuration was never after as simple
as in Windows NT 4.
