John Xerox posted:

Virus talk -- Archive.org have just now launched a museum of malware where you can see various DOS malware in action: https://archive.org/details/malwaremuseum

thathonkey posted:

Remember when wordperfect still competed with ms word

Jose Oquendo posted:

Is it still used in the legal profession? I think that was the last 'holdout'

Jose Oquendo posted:

Is it still used in the legal profession? I think that was the last 'holdout'

Germstore posted:

I don't think he has anything to worry about. So many companies have random processes totally dependent on random excel vba scripts that no one knows the origin of.

Bonzo posted:

Speaking of office staff using old poo poo; I know a guy who is in his late 50s and makes good money on the side writing Excel macros for small accounting firms. He's currently pissed off because there are rumors that Microsoft is going to stop licensing VBScript and remove it completely from the Office Suite.

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

Blonde and snobby-looking.

thathonkey posted:

somebody posted it last page but I had forgotten all about Paint Shop Pro. haha what a piece of absolute garbage that software was. especially given that photoshop was around at the time.

but iirc it was a fraction of the cost. that only mattered if you were too stupid to

stubblyhead posted:

Licensing it from whom? Isn't it their own creation?

thathonkey posted:

somebody posted it last page but I had forgotten all about Paint Shop Pro. haha what a piece of absolute garbage that software was. especially given that photoshop was around at the time.

but iirc it was a fraction of the cost. that only mattered if you were too stupid to

The Kins posted:

Oh, cool! I loved old 16-color icons when I was but a wee Win 3.1 user.


Do you have any other MS design stories? They were never exactly the hippest company, but a lot of stuff from the 3.1 and 95 era has just kind of stuck with me, for some reason.

Bonzo posted:

In 1996 I ordered a computer from TigerDirect. Since it was it came with WordPerfect Suite and Corel Draw. In addition to the install CDs you had 4 CDs full of clip art of 2 or 3 books with an index of the clipart pictures and told you witch CD it was on and the file name.

Keith Atherton posted:

the infamous Hot Dog Stand.

Keith Atherton posted:

My first boss and a coworker designed all the Win 3.1 icons. They are also responsible for the desktop themes including the infamous Hot Dog Stand. I did a ton of toolbar icons for Word and Excel early.

Microsoft was actually a really fun place to work in the early-mid '90s. For several years in the summer they had an outdoor thing every Friday at about 4 with free food and beer and wine. Our whole division would get to go to a movie a few times a year on a weekday morning. It might be hard to believe but back when I started Word and Excel were underdogs against Word Perfect and Lotus 123. When Microsoft became dominant with Office and the antitrust thing happened a lot of the fun went out of it.

One thing that is way different now is that user experience was not really considered critical back then. It was hard to sell ideas because we were just "the icon team". For instance there were only two designers who did all the work on Win 95. One guy was assigned to Word, another to Excel but even they did other projects.

I was the designer for the first version of Outlook. That took over three years to hammer out. If you hate Outlook be thankful we didn't go with some of the goofy directions we considered early on

Sten Freak posted:

It is so hard to consider, even at that stage, such small development teams working on iconic projects like that.

I do recall Lotus 123 being THE spreadsheet program. It was the first I used and still use the slash commands in Excel which came up a few pages back.

Keith Atherton posted:

That took over three years to hammer out. If you hate Outlook be thankful we didn't go with some of the goofy directions we considered early on

fuckingtest posted:

In 1996 I worked for a company that did poo poo like flyers and business cards. The guy who ran it was an old rear end in a top hat and still did mockups for flyer jobs in letraset and rubylith in like 1995. I knew Photoshop and some prepress stuff but didn't dare question his authority since he payed me. They had a guy who did everything for small runs in Corel Draw and sent the files to the IT Guy / Digital Prepress. I did the stuff like cutting, media feeding, etc. So the old guy who ran the shop was always bitching about everything tells me to grab some 27"x40" stock and place it in the feeder roller for the big rear end IBM digital press. I grab a roll, carry it to the machine (poo poo weighs like 60 lbs) and set it in the slats for the roller. It locks in and then the glorified pentium that runs the machine beeps saying "Incorrect feed" or some such poo poo. The old guy wallows over and picks up the roll, and slams it up and down twice. The machine barfs up an error, and he goes apeshit and starts blaming me. In short, I get fired. The It guy follows me to my desk and apologizes. On the way out I grab my stuff from the office, including a giant rear end binder of CD's and this book:



I have never opened or used any of that crappy clipart, yet it still sits on my shelf as a reminder of how terrible that job was.

thathonkey posted:

somebody posted it last page but I had forgotten all about Paint Shop Pro. haha what a piece of absolute garbage that software was. especially given that photoshop was around at the time.

but iirc it was a fraction of the cost. that only mattered if you were too stupid to

WebDog posted:

Now I'm curious.
My main gripe with Outlook are the obtuse settings packed into small dialogue boxes where it's a nest of buttons and tabs - I do wonder how much of that is legacy as I know it's been like that for at least a decade.

Keith Atherton posted:

One bygone thing that was cool is that project teams would put in Easter eggs. Usually a credits list of everyone who worked on it but Excel once had a Doom-like thing you could walk around in. That all went away with the Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2001 or so.

Keith Atherton posted:

That was a nightmare to try to get right. Handling settings is tough because categories can end up arbitrary. At one point the settings dialog box was going to have three horizontal rows of tabs. If you clicked on a tab in the one of the top rows that row would jump down to the bottom row.

quote:

Likewise the Notes PM wanted the forms to look like Rolodex cards.

quote:

One bygone thing that was cool is that project teams would put in Easter eggs. Usually a credits list of everyone who worked on it but Excel once had a Doom-like thing you could walk around in. That all went away with the Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2001 or so.

Non Serviam posted:

This is a Spanish pc gaming magazine. I remember reading it cover to cover, several times over. It also included those Cds with demos and stuff.
It's the release of King Quest VII, so it's a long time ago. It's funny this is the first Google Image result I got when I googled the name, considering I only remember this cover and one with Alone in the Dark.

Edit. Holy shiiiiit

WebDog posted:

Having lines of tabs that swapped rows was pretty common in Windows at the time. If you look really hard you might find some leftovers buried in an ancient settings prompt.

thathonkey posted:

somebody posted it last page but I had forgotten all about Paint Shop Pro. haha what a piece of absolute garbage that software was. especially given that photoshop was around at the time.

but iirc it was a fraction of the cost. that only mattered if you were too stupid to

Keith Atherton posted:

That was a nightmare to try to get right. Handling settings is tough because categories can end up arbitrary. At one point the settings dialog box was going to have three horizontal rows of tabs. If you clicked on a tab in the one of the top rows that row would jump down to the bottom row. Yeah.

The left side row of icons to switch between contacts, mail, notes was a design that took a LONG time to arrive at. For quite a while the plan was to have a launcher dialog box that had a button for each app or folder. Which meant you'd have a separate window for each app.

The program manager I worked with on the mail view wanted to have email forms look like actual physical mail and have a cancelled stamp image on the top right and the sender's info on the top left like a return address. It took a lot to convince him this was a bad idea. Likewise the Notes PM wanted the forms to look like Rolodex cards. Oh and when the web became a thing all of a sudden there was this big push to make the whole thing "web like" which meant they wanted animations and color and god knows what else. Luckily our baseline was 16 colors and 640x480 so that wasn't technically possible thank god.

One bygone thing that was cool is that project teams would put in Easter eggs. Usually a credits list of everyone who worked on it but Excel once had a Doom-like thing you could walk around in. That all went away with the Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2001 or so.

Gonzo the Eggman posted:

Hey! We used that to create/edit Doom sprites.
It may not have been as feature-rich as Photoshop but it was still good for what it did.

Speaking of Doom, I once bought this:



(And, haha, yes, I've still got it. Along with my original Jagged Alliance disc)

Police Automaton posted:

I'd say piracy nowadays is easier than it ever was. Back then with no internet we had to get our pirated software off of friends, coworkers, relatives... including all the viruses you could fit on these disks. Granted, back then these would only make the computer act weird or delete a disk, not send your bank account credentials to chinese/russian mobsters.

Corn Burst posted:

Haha I bought D!Zone as well. Never could get it to work though (I had Doom 95 for Windows).

Non Serviam posted:

WebDog posted:

Having lines of tabs that swapped rows was pretty common in Windows at the time. If you look really hard you might find some leftovers buried in an ancient settings prompt.

Keith Atherton posted:

Gonzo the Eggman posted:

Aye carumba! Is that King's Quest VII in the top-right corner? It sure went cartoony since KQ IV - which we had on our old IBM monochrome 286.

Police Automaton posted:

I'd say piracy nowadays is easier than it ever was. Back then with no internet we had to get our pirated software off of friends, coworkers, relatives... including all the viruses you could fit on these disks. Granted, back then these would only make the computer act weird or delete a disk, not send your bank account credentials to chinese/russian mobsters.

Gonzo the Eggman posted:

Speaking of Doom, I once bought this:



(And, haha, yes, I've still got it. Along with my original Jagged Alliance disc)

Keith Atherton posted:

Yeah I think I'm not remembering right. Scrolling tabs was one solution we considered. Like arrow buttons on the left and right of the tab row so you could scroll through tabs.