Here's someone's personal archive of weird miscellanea, including old Windows wallpapers which is what reminded me. I use unironically use the classic Packard Bell tile background on my computers because it reminds me of my grandmother's PC which is one of the first I ever used.
Packard Bell is one of those logos that really perplexes me as to what exactly it's supposed to represent. A very stylised "P B" somehow? An ear with an earphone stuck in it? An abstract vacuum tube? A crushed air-cooled engine block?
These personal collections are always neat to see. I'd like to start my own (beyond scraps in my local Pictures folder) but I'm not sure how to structure it. I might just build a grid of tagged/categorized media, like a chaotic memory palace.
When I could run Windows 3.1, I had no multimedia thing. I have found PC Speaker driver somewhere, and it could play event sounds like start-up, but could not play in ordinary player. Same WAV in player won't play because it is not "event sound". And no MIDI of course. Windows 3.1 was somewhere around, but it was nothing to do there. Graphics on EGA was slow. Windows 3.1 was telling us: if you want your programs to work fast, write them for bare metal, and we were using bare metal programs in DOS and writing bare metal programs for DOS.
First time I heard MIDI was Windows 98 already. Graphics of Windows was still slow compared to DOS, but Windows 98 offered more experience. Other developers were raising questions why do they write slow programs for Windows when they could write fast programs for DOS. From times of sound card arrival I recall that there was a bridge between CD-ROM and soundcard, and DOS Navigator could control playback of CD tracks, and that was they way we had music for ordinary activity.
Most memories about MIDI are related to custom Duke Nukem 3D maps. Custom maps sometimes included custom graphics in ART files and custom music in MIDI format. Duke Nukem 3D is the most recognized MIDI player. In Windows I could download Macromedia Flash file, observe the slide show, think "guys, when will you learn to program?" Exit Windows, run Duke Nukem 3D, wonder why can some programmers deliver real time 3D graphics, and other programmers cannot even draw 2D. Oh, and MIDI plays in the background because Duke Nukem 3D music is MIDI.
Computers were wondrous and amazing then. Every feature and capability was exciting and full of promise. Now I see node modules, IAM, surveillance, adtech. It’s more like repulsion. Very sad.
I know this isnt related to the post, but does anyone remember the artist or website that had a bunch of cool textures and colorful tiled wallpaper for the early days of linux? think mid-90s.
I've been scratching my head for years and my searches have never found it, but there has to be some white beards here that can recall it.
I remember there were some really cool options available, I believe in a square format for better tiling. If anyone can remember and post a link or archive I would very much appreciate it.
Yes! This is it, thank you! I've been trying to find these for a long while. I even remember co-opting some for a Geocities page back in the day when those were kinda cool lol!
I sort of miss when my way of using GUI desktops involved the wallpaper sometimes being visible. These days It’s all quarter/half/full windows that rarely close, and certainly are never minimized.
I don't think i ever have something fully maximized (aside from games, though even then sometimes i play in windowed mode). Even when i do maximize a window (which isn't often but some programs like Krita work better like that), the dock and miniwindows (i'm using Window Maker as my window manager) still take their own space and the background shows through. Also i often have a bunch of terminal windows minimized, then i forget about them and open new ones until at some point i go and garbage collect them :-P
Been auto-hiding the taskbar since Win 95, and feel the need for the feature all the more with the macOS dock. I doubt I’ve spent a collective hour without auto-hide on the dock in more than a decade of macOS :-)
Depends on what I'm doing... but I'll often split windows, then stretch them to overlap slightly, or I'll have other windows that are always windowed over the top of others.
If I'm just browsing/chatting, I'll often just have one floating window centered.
It just depends on what I'm doing, how focused I am on task and how much space I really have.
macOS is still somewhat like this, if you avoid the "full screen" maximize just double clicking the titlebar will only grow the window to fit the content rather than have the window to fill the screen.
Its a lot like papers on a desk, and I know tons of folks here don't care for that model but I quite like it, especially in conjunction with stage manager.
Oh, I was there for a good deal of it. Win 3.1 was my first GUI OS. Remember wacky compositor add-ons to x-window to get the wobbly windows and the really good transparency that doesn’t wait for you to stop moving the window to update, on Linux.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
One of my hobbies is to install older versions of windows and play around with them a bit - at the moment I have 86Box emulating an old machine with windows 3.11 installed and Visual C++, and I'm writing a little implementaiton of DFT so I can simulate a water molecule. Mostly because I want to go back to the days of when I had a 486 in my bedroom, I finally got a graphical desktop working, and the feeling of joy with the old wallpapers, the clock running, a coding IDE, I spent hours in there learning about memory allocations, functions, OpenGL, such good memories that turned into a lifelong career.
Tiles were comparably slow to draw. Windows 3.1 and maybe more recent Windows had a background option called "patterns". These are 8x8 patterns of black-over-something. Second color is customizable. It could be white, but also something else. EGA/VGA hardware specific is that 8 pixel wide repeating stuff can be drawn relatively quickly. Patterns were not inside files. They are probably inside registry? Or ini files?
Whatever. The end result is that patterns are forgotten and omitted from retro background collections.
back in the 3.11/95 era when doing troubleshooting of slow PC's I would always change the bitmap wallpaper to a solid color. nothing more painful then watching a slow machine waste resources trying to render a desktop background.
Gosh, my brain just got all fuzzy going through those one after the next. Transitioning from the previous era of CGA to 16 colors was so very exciting at the time.
Some time ago I wanted the original MS solitaire playing card files. Wasn't too hard to find a copy of the binary, but the interesting thing to me is it appeared the files were handwritten- a couple possible typos in color and not a single byte longer than they needed to be.
It's weird that those give me nostalgia when I clearly remember our PC having a monochrome monitor. I wonder if my brain is retrofitting stuff or whether if any of those survived to Windows 98.
Funny coincidence. I was just (as in just now) looking for a graphics driver for my old Pentium laptop to get Windows 3.1 to work at the full 800x600 resolution.
Install Windows 3.11 and Calmira Desktop, it will give you a Win95 like taskbar and maybe a better explorer. It's libre software. With Win 3.11 you can even set networking and read HN at gopher://hngopher.com
Also, with an IRC client and the public servers from https:/bitlbee.org you can connect most modern protocols such as Jabber/Mastodon/Discord and the like and still be communicated.
Usenet it's usenet, still works with http://www.eternal-september.org, there are still good newsgroups out there, from computers to misc.news.internet.discuss .
Sigh ... boots C64 with a rather odd coax to SCART to HDMI daisy-chain video interface. I also have a QSII joystick that I didn't quite manage to ruin playing Daley Thompson decathalon.
Here's someone's personal archive of weird miscellanea, including old Windows wallpapers which is what reminded me. I use unironically use the classic Packard Bell tile background on my computers because it reminds me of my grandmother's PC which is one of the first I ever used.
https://www.dvd3000.ca/wp/extra/pb.html
site hugged to death. Wayback:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260226093719/https://www.dvd30...
That etched 3 colour look to this very day remains the peak of modern aesthetic for me. Thought it was so cool and sophisticated when I was 12
Agreed it is amazing
Packard Bell is one of those logos that really perplexes me as to what exactly it's supposed to represent. A very stylised "P B" somehow? An ear with an earphone stuck in it? An abstract vacuum tube? A crushed air-cooled engine block?
It's a face, specifically the "face of technology". [0]
[0] https://1000logos.net/packard-bell-logo/
These personal collections are always neat to see. I'd like to start my own (beyond scraps in my local Pictures folder) but I'm not sure how to structure it. I might just build a grid of tagged/categorized media, like a chaotic memory palace.
I checked the website and he/she did a lot of really cool stuffs.
If you want your nostalgia in multimedia - https://canyonmid.com/
When I could run Windows 3.1, I had no multimedia thing. I have found PC Speaker driver somewhere, and it could play event sounds like start-up, but could not play in ordinary player. Same WAV in player won't play because it is not "event sound". And no MIDI of course. Windows 3.1 was somewhere around, but it was nothing to do there. Graphics on EGA was slow. Windows 3.1 was telling us: if you want your programs to work fast, write them for bare metal, and we were using bare metal programs in DOS and writing bare metal programs for DOS.
First time I heard MIDI was Windows 98 already. Graphics of Windows was still slow compared to DOS, but Windows 98 offered more experience. Other developers were raising questions why do they write slow programs for Windows when they could write fast programs for DOS. From times of sound card arrival I recall that there was a bridge between CD-ROM and soundcard, and DOS Navigator could control playback of CD tracks, and that was they way we had music for ordinary activity.
Most memories about MIDI are related to custom Duke Nukem 3D maps. Custom maps sometimes included custom graphics in ART files and custom music in MIDI format. Duke Nukem 3D is the most recognized MIDI player. In Windows I could download Macromedia Flash file, observe the slide show, think "guys, when will you learn to program?" Exit Windows, run Duke Nukem 3D, wonder why can some programmers deliver real time 3D graphics, and other programmers cannot even draw 2D. Oh, and MIDI plays in the background because Duke Nukem 3D music is MIDI.
Computers were wondrous and amazing then. Every feature and capability was exciting and full of promise. Now I see node modules, IAM, surveillance, adtech. It’s more like repulsion. Very sad.
Look info perma/retrocomputing. Write your own text editor. Where we’re going, 640 kB of memory ought to be enough.
Nice. Kind of wish they'd used a shader to approximate the barrel distortion in the curvature of the Tandy monitor.
34 years of nostalgia there. Well, not continuously, but y'know.
Remember this video? https://www.reddit.com/r/Lostwave/comments/1169ku2/unknown_p...
I'm curious about how much bigger the video is than the actual canyon.mid file.
Love that.
As an aside, that keyboard in particular had the best click I've ever experienced.
Better than the Model M?
I've own both, and this one had a nice sticky/tacky sound without a tacky feel. The Model M felt and sounded like loading a releasing a spring!
I saw that another commenter suggested this one may have been a repackaged Model M. If it was, it must have had different switches that I preferred.
Pretty sure that is a Model M, just whitelabeled.
I know this isnt related to the post, but does anyone remember the artist or website that had a bunch of cool textures and colorful tiled wallpaper for the early days of linux? think mid-90s.
I've been scratching my head for years and my searches have never found it, but there has to be some white beards here that can recall it.
I remember there were some really cool options available, I believe in a square format for better tiling. If anyone can remember and post a link or archive I would very much appreciate it.
If it's what I'm thinking of, it was the "Propaganda" wallpapers. I remember using them in Red Hat 6 in the late 90s!
https://github.com/BenjaminHCCarr/PropagandaTiles
Seems to match what's in the desktop-backgrounds RPM on this ISO (CD 1)
https://archive.org/details/red-hat-linux-6.1
Yes! This is it, thank you! I've been trying to find these for a long while. I even remember co-opting some for a Geocities page back in the day when those were kinda cool lol!
This may also be relevant: <https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/logos/!INDEX.html>
Was it tigert? Or maybe Garrett LeSage?
k10k.com maybe
I sort of miss when my way of using GUI desktops involved the wallpaper sometimes being visible. These days It’s all quarter/half/full windows that rarely close, and certainly are never minimized.
I don't think i ever have something fully maximized (aside from games, though even then sometimes i play in windowed mode). Even when i do maximize a window (which isn't often but some programs like Krita work better like that), the dock and miniwindows (i'm using Window Maker as my window manager) still take their own space and the background shows through. Also i often have a bunch of terminal windows minimized, then i forget about them and open new ones until at some point i go and garbage collect them :-P
Been auto-hiding the taskbar since Win 95, and feel the need for the feature all the more with the macOS dock. I doubt I’ve spent a collective hour without auto-hide on the dock in more than a decade of macOS :-)
Also, windows are not multiple. Each draw.io wants to be big rectangle because it is web garbage. Each chat program, unlike what Psi and QIP were
Depends on what I'm doing... but I'll often split windows, then stretch them to overlap slightly, or I'll have other windows that are always windowed over the top of others.
If I'm just browsing/chatting, I'll often just have one floating window centered.
It just depends on what I'm doing, how focused I am on task and how much space I really have.
macOS is still somewhat like this, if you avoid the "full screen" maximize just double clicking the titlebar will only grow the window to fit the content rather than have the window to fill the screen.
Its a lot like papers on a desk, and I know tons of folks here don't care for that model but I quite like it, especially in conjunction with stage manager.
I’m on macOS, it’s where I started working this way… uh… 12ish years ago.
Still using Spectacle for window management, despite its being long-discontinued. Still works, never a problem or glitch at all.
We had a lot more TUIs and transparent terms / libs with transparency. Things like Xchat, etc.
Oh, I was there for a good deal of it. Win 3.1 was my first GUI OS. Remember wacky compositor add-ons to x-window to get the wobbly windows and the really good transparency that doesn’t wait for you to stop moving the window to update, on Linux.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Somewhat related: https://pixelmoondust.neocities.org/archives/archivedtiles/b...
One of my hobbies is to install older versions of windows and play around with them a bit - at the moment I have 86Box emulating an old machine with windows 3.11 installed and Visual C++, and I'm writing a little implementaiton of DFT so I can simulate a water molecule. Mostly because I want to go back to the days of when I had a 486 in my bedroom, I finally got a graphical desktop working, and the feeling of joy with the old wallpapers, the clock running, a coding IDE, I spent hours in there learning about memory allocations, functions, OpenGL, such good memories that turned into a lifelong career.
we have a crt tv with built in vhs in our office and have a bunch of old tapes
one is “Mastering Windows 3.1”
it’s fun to run in the background while working
for your enjoyment, here’s a similar 3.1 tutorial video from that era uploaded to YouTube
https://youtu.be/KRi5mjMgORk?si=OFH7UhOQif5EUCtg
That's a great idea. It would be neat if you could also cast media to it somehow.
Early Rokus had rca out (sometimes through a 1/8" jack)
Background knowledge is invaluable.
Tiles were comparably slow to draw. Windows 3.1 and maybe more recent Windows had a background option called "patterns". These are 8x8 patterns of black-over-something. Second color is customizable. It could be white, but also something else. EGA/VGA hardware specific is that 8 pixel wide repeating stuff can be drawn relatively quickly. Patterns were not inside files. They are probably inside registry? Or ini files?
Whatever. The end result is that patterns are forgotten and omitted from retro background collections.
back in the 3.11/95 era when doing troubleshooting of slow PC's I would always change the bitmap wallpaper to a solid color. nothing more painful then watching a slow machine waste resources trying to render a desktop background.
Later on...
"Why did Windows 7, for a few months, log on slower if you have a solid color background?"
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250428-00/?p=11...
Gosh, my brain just got all fuzzy going through those one after the next. Transitioning from the previous era of CGA to 16 colors was so very exciting at the time.
I feel an ocular migraine coming on looking at these.
On CRT displays, did these not cause visual problems in the same way? I remember having no trouble looking at these years ago.
the 256color.bmp looks wrong, it's supposed to look more 3d, because it actually does use the 256 color pallette
yep that ones quantized to the system palette with no dithering, better version here: https://peakd.com/pixelart/@zelet/pixel-art-series-3-homage-...
You are a king, thank you
I stared at that little image for hours, just being blown away that a computer can show so many colours. Then I became a graphics programmer...
Some time ago I wanted the original MS solitaire playing card files. Wasn't too hard to find a copy of the binary, but the interesting thing to me is it appeared the files were handwritten- a couple possible typos in color and not a single byte longer than they needed to be.
Exactly as I remember - very few of them actually usable as backgrounds because they're so garish.
But pleasant enough when viewed on a monochrome display.
For more nostalgia: https://images.ira.abramov.org/Propaganda/
What tickles me is that Andreas put these on GitHub 13 years ago.
That’s long enough in tech to be considered retro in and of itself… let alone the age of these tiled backgrounds!
Someone who bought Windows 3.1 could easily be a grandparent by now, even if their first kid was born on release day.
And the kid could be born when this upload was done, and now be downloading!
Love this. Do it again, but for the whole package history of propaganda-debian.
Edit: I guess the package still exists, even though many desktop refuse to tile jpg. :/
And if you want your nostalgia interactive - https://pieter.com
Boy how I love them all, especially Egypt, which looks like the shekel symbol, and the arches.
It's weird that those give me nostalgia when I clearly remember our PC having a monochrome monitor. I wonder if my brain is retrofitting stuff or whether if any of those survived to Windows 98.
Funny coincidence. I was just (as in just now) looking for a graphics driver for my old Pentium laptop to get Windows 3.1 to work at the full 800x600 resolution.
Install Windows 3.11 and Calmira Desktop, it will give you a Win95 like taskbar and maybe a better explorer. It's libre software. With Win 3.11 you can even set networking and read HN at gopher://hngopher.com
Also, with an IRC client and the public servers from https:/bitlbee.org you can connect most modern protocols such as Jabber/Mastodon/Discord and the like and still be communicated.
Usenet it's usenet, still works with http://www.eternal-september.org, there are still good newsgroups out there, from computers to misc.news.internet.discuss .
the leaves one is really nice.
It was actually.
Tried it as my background for a bit as it looks good tiled, but mainly used the two tartans or just a solid blue.
Cool! Tiled wallpapers are underrated. They will always work, regardless of resolution and attached monitors.
Peak Windows. Everything went downhill from there.
It was the start of the rise towards the peak, which was reached with Windows 2000.
Delightful! Glad someone posted this
It's funny that these all look more modern than you typically see on desktops.
Oh, man, does that bring back the memories!
Thanks for sharing. :-)
It seems to be missing that tiled red brick.
Last night I dreamed of flying toasters
Sigh ... boots C64 with a rather odd coax to SCART to HDMI daisy-chain video interface. I also have a QSII joystick that I didn't quite manage to ruin playing Daley Thompson decathalon.
very good
thanks bro <3
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