The Screenshots of Yesteryears

Friday, March 1st, 2013

I take an insane amount of screenshots from my work as a tech writer, and am so used to documenting almost everything with screenshots, I'll typically take screenshots of new apps when I install them even if I'm not planning on writing a review. I took the time to capture the CS6 splash screens just for fun. It's a tiny obsession of mine, one that - aside from writing reviews - I've never really done anything with.

A post on John Gruber's Daring Fireball today reminded me of the joys of Folklore.org's index of tales of the early days of Apple. I've read every article on the site years ago, but the article Gruber mentioned today - about how Mac OS Classic's calculator UI came to be - got me searching for more screenshots of the Mac Classic calculator, just to compare the image.

That led me to an amazing site, GUIdebook.org, which features very nice screenshot collections of UIs ranging from Mac OS System 1 through OS X Panther, Amiga OS Workbench 1.0, OPENSTEP, the original Symbian OS, and more. It also has a number of rather old articles about early operating systems, as well as classic tech ads, interviews, icons, and more. It's the most comprehensive UI - and OS history - site you can imagine, and it's nicely designed. The only sad thing is that the site hasn't been updated since 2006, apparently as the site's author started working as an user experience designer at Google around that time.

Screenshots of new apps today might not seem like anything important, but 20 years from now, someone will be looking back at screenshots of OS X Mountain Lion and Windows 8 with the same nostalgia and curiosity that we look at Mac 1 and Amiga screnshots. It makes me want to start preserving more screenshots from the latest stuff today … yet another project I'd like to take on sometime.

So, if you want to waste some time this weekend on tech nostalgia - or want to see what UIs looked like before your time - here's some great resources. Know of any more?

Folklore.org - tales of Apple's early days, along with some stories about Microsoft and more
GUIdebook.org - A detailed site filled with screenshots, splash screens, icons, sounds, ads, and more from older OSes and apps.
TostyTech GUIs - A similar site (with a more '90's looking site design) that has screenshots of everything from the Xerox Alto to OS/2 to Windows 8. Not as intricately organized as GUIdebook, but still an awesome resource for old screenshots.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.