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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 46.9 ms ] threadThat’s long enough in tech to be considered retro in and of itself… let alone the age of these tiled backgrounds!
Thanks for sharing. :-)
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
https://www.dvd3000.ca/wp/extra/pb.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20260226093719/https://www.dvd30...
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.
Edit: I guess the package still exists, even though many desktop refuse to tile jpg. :/
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.