đź’ľ nostalgia.janosilles.com
2000
machine: Pentium II based desktop PC
OS: Windows 98
resolution: 1024x768The earliest screenshot I could dig up. Sadly, I cannot tell the exact day it was taken. This is from my first PC but at this time it was about 2 years old.
At the age of 13 I was learning English with the help of an offline dictionary. The screenshot predates Google Translate by 6 years. At the time this screenshot was taken I think I didn’t have an internet connection or if I did it was really recent. A handed down 33.6kbps telephone modem.
At least now I know what frequent means.
I had this genius idea to keep program shortcuts in the quick launch area of the taskbar, increase the height and make the taskbar self-hiding. I don’t think I keep that on for long, it looks a bit stupid and I think I realized it.
I have MS Paint on the quick launch area, I’m pretty sure this image was saved with MS Paint because I found it in bmp file format in an old CD. This machine did not have a CD writer in it, I am not sure how this file moved over the years, there is a chance that I used a floppy at one point.
2002-01-24?
machine: Pentium II based desktop PC
OS: Windows 98
resolution: 800x600Looks like I was using dark mode before it was cool.
Total Commander as called Windows Commander back then.
This could be Windows Me, I am not sure if I can tell from this screenshot but I do remember running Windows Me for a while.
2002-03-01?
machine: Pentium II based desktop PC
OS: Windows 98
resolution: 800x600I find it hard to believe that in 2002 I was using the screen resolution of 800x600 pixels. I have earlier screenshots with higher resolution.
Picked the date from the file listing in the background. There is a directory with this timestamp, so the screenshot cannot be younger than this.
I am trying to watch a copy of the Final Fantasy movie but I’m running into issues with loading the subtitles. I remember fighting with codecs and codec-pack, not having a real understanding about what they are or how they work. They were magic dust that I had to install and Windows Media player started playing the files.
I was using Windows Commander for everything, I kept my most used program in the toolbar. The Q and T icons are for QuickBASIC and Turbo Pascal, the little turtle is ComeniusLogo.
2002-04-07
OS: Windows 98
resolution: 1024x768Gyalogló was a large (largest?) web based chat in Hungary. I was hanging out there almost every day when I was a high school student, from 6pm to 9pm usually. The local dial-up pricing made connections after 6pm cheaper. I haven’t heard about IRC then.
The banner on the top of the page says “Also available on WAP”. WAP was a really really dumbed down web-like feature on some “dumb” phones. I did have a wap-capable phone at the time, a Nokia 3330 the wap-capable brother of the famous 3310, but I don’t remember ever trying to connect to the chat from my phone. Times change, now I almost only chat from my phone.
When I wanted to chat with my friends I used an “instant messaging” program. First ICQ and later MSN Messenger. Both programs become slow and large, when I discoverd Trillian I happily switched. It was a much faster small app without the bloat and it had the ability to chat on multiple networks.
Internet_Explorer dominated the market back then, 98% market share among browsers. To be honest it wasn’t bad, it did not feel slower or bloated compared to other browsers in 2002. Later I discovered Opera which introduced me to the radical idea of tabs. I and never looked back.
2002-04-20
The red arrows are obviously hand drawn, I am not totally sure what I wanted to show with them. The timestamp on the page was in the future, I probably wanted to show that to someone.
Looks like I changed windows theme from default to this green theme.
2003-01-05
I was discovering Windows XP themes. Downloading random .msstyles files from the internet and patching a .dll to skip checking the style file signatures.
I was into The Lord of the Rings. I think I had a wallpaper changer running in the background that rotated wallpapers of the characters.
Using Trillian to chat on multiple networks. and Opera for browsing the web. Looks like I was setting up Apache and PHP. I probably wanted to play with Wordpress or Drupal.
High taskbar with a custom quick launch bar appears again.
2004-02-09
machine: Pentium 3? based desktop PC
OS: UHU-Linux
resolution: 1024x768I loved playing with alternative operating systems as a child. I had almost no idea what I was doing. I had no access to the internet so I depended on free CDs usually attached to computer magazines. I remember spending hours clicking around in SuSE Linux, BeOS PE and probably others I’ve forgotten. It was a wild west, they all felt magical. Something so strange and so useless.
UHU Linux was the first that stuck. I never managed to switch to it fully, I loved playing games on Windows and my sister was using the machine as well, forcing her to this weird Linux thing was not an option but I kept it for dual booting.
UHU is long dead, their last release was in 2014. I never used it as my main operating system, I was using Ubuntu when I first made the switch but I think UHU is the reason I kept my interest in Linux. The UHU community was really helpful, and in hindsight it must have been very small, they had a couple low volume mailing lists where I could get help if I was stuck.
Not sure why I took a screenshot of the ATi Control Panel, my video card had a TV out and I got my hands on a 5 meters long RCA cable and I really wanted to connect my PC to my family’s TV. I think I wanted to watch movies on it, but the quality was never great, not to mention the trip hazard of the cable runqning through the house. I think I had problems using the TV output from Windows and I could make it work through Linux which blew my mind. Nowadays HDMI is ubiquitous and connecting a PC to a TV is trivial.
2004
This is a cropped screenshot I created to show off my personalized foobar2000.
I was into metal music as a teenager and being a nerd meant I cannot just use WinAmp anymore, I had to use foobar2k a customizable music player.
It is also supposed to have greater sound, which was wasted on me because by the looks of it I was listening to 128kbps mp3 files.
2005-04-14
OS: Windows XPWindows XP with custom uxtheme titlebars and probably a custom looking taskbar as well. Taskbar is on autohide and I had an instance of WinBar for some basic system information. Looks like the last release of WinBar was in 2013, someone in 2024 left a comment about subpar Windows 11 comptability.
The browser is Opera, a beta version even. At the time Opera was paid software and the free version had an ad banner at the top. I somehow figured out how to blank that bar so it doesn’t show ads. I think at the time this was the only browser that allowed to put the tab bar to the right side of the screen, which I really liked.
A note, that this Opera has nothing to do with the currently (as of 2025) available Opera browser. They sold the rights to the name and the original authors created Vivaldi.
2007-06-27
OS: Ubuntu
Resolution: 1400x1050
machine: Acer TravelMate 6000 laptopAround this time I was a full time Linux user. This is most likely Ubuntu. I was using Gnome 2.x for a while then tried KDE and maybe even XFCE. Sadly I couldn’t find any screenshots of those. I didn’t have too much RAM at the time so I kept looking for thinner desktops, I landed on handrolling my desktop with custom panels and openbox as window manager.
I loved using “quake like” terminals and browser tabs on the side.
2007-09-10
OS: Ubuntu
Resolution: 1400x1050
machine: Acer TravelMate 6000 laptopThis is my university timetable.
2007-09-30
I removed the actual text from the chat window for privacy reasons.
Based on the chat, I was watching It Crowd in that mplayer window. The blue is part of the screenshot, the screenshot tool I used couldn’t capture the hardware accelerated video.
HUP is still up and running today, 16 years later.
2008-08-17
Ghost in the Shell themed wallpaper. I really enjoyed the anime series, I have a folder with a dozen of GitS themed wallpapers to this day and I was using this wallpaper for years.
I think this is the first time I took a screenshot just for showing it off. All previous images were taken for something more specific.
2008-09-26
I couldn’t remember the program’s name that created the slide-down terminal but I remembered it used urxvt so I google “quake like urxvt” and in the first result I stumbled into a post of mine from 14 years ago that mentions the name of the program: yeahconsole. Thanks past-me.
The Neofetch-like tool is a perl script that I probably downloaded from the Arch Linux forums. Neofetch was released 7 years after this screenshot, but these kinds of script were popular before.
2009-12-21
machine: Dell Studio 1555
OS: Windows 7
resolution: 1366x768My previous laptop was getting old and I got a good deal on a new Dell machine. I learned some lessons with this laptop.
At this point I was using Arch Linux so I did my homework, I checked the Arch Wiki if this laptop is supported, it had a page and it said it is supported. What I didn’t realize was that AMD/ATi GPU’s power saving feature was not working on Linux. The machine did work but it was really hot and loud and the battery run out in 30 minutes when running Linux.
I don’t remember all the things I tried but finally I gave up and Installed Windows 7. By this time I was using Linux for everything and using Windows again felt backwards and I really wanted to keep using those tools. I converted the Arch Linux partition into a virtual machine image and started experimenting.
I ended up with this weird thing, running a Windows native version of X server and starting the Linux programs in the virtual machine. This worked surprisingly well! I could keep using the Linux terminal even GUI apps. I think this setup is similar in spirit to how WSL2 works, that Microsoft introduced 10 years after this. It was a fun setup, CPU performance was good but it eat into memory. Even with the virtual machine running the laptop stayed cool and had okay battery life.
Another lesson I learned was the resolution. I switched from a 4:3 ration to one with 16:9 and to a smaller pixel count. 1366x768 was popular in laptops around that time but after using this laptop I knew I will never get anything this small again. If you remember how Windows 7 is supposed to look you may notice that I made the windows titles and the taskbar heights smaller to gain a couple precious extra pixels.
2010-11-15
machine: Dell Studio 1555
OS: Windows 7
resolution: 1366x768This is a funny one. It is still Windows 7 with Arch Linux in a virtual machine, you can see the Start button peaking in the bottom left corner, but instead of having all graphical Linux programs run in their own window I switched X server to draw one large window and run my own window manager inside it for Linux apps. Because I wanted to avoid managing windows inside a window and getting confused I ran a tiling window manager called Xmonad and relied on keyboard shortcuts when I was working with Linux apps.
This felt better to work with than having a VNC/remote desktop into the VM.
2011-06-12
machine: Dell Studio 1555
OS: Windows 7
resolution: 1366x768This image must have been taken soon before I switched back to Linux on this laptop.
On Windows, I was listening to music with foobar2000, I don’t have a screenshot but I did not spend any time customizing it this time, the super customized version in a previous screenshot was a thing of the past.
2011-08-12
Dell Studio 1555After a year Linux kernel ATi driver gained power saving support that was good enough to use this laptop with Linux again so I went back to my favorite custom openbox setup.
2012-03-14
machine: Dell Studio 1555
OS: Arch Linux, Gnome
resolution: 1366x768Gnome 3.0 was released about year ago, I’ve read online that it polarizes people and I wanted to see whats it all about. I installed it, started using it and it just clicked. To this day, 12 years later, I am still using Gnome as my main desktop environment. I prefer it to macOS, I prefer it to Windows. It works the way I think, I don’t feel like I’m fighting my computer when I’m using it.
2014-05-18
machine: HP TouchSmart 15j
OS: Arch Linux, Gnome
resolution: 1920x1080I got a new laptop for myself, this time a bigger stronger machine with full HD resolution. There is nothing interesting in this screenshot other than it is the first I could find made on the new latop.
2016-01-30
machine: ASUS ZenBook
OS: Arch Linux, Gnome
resolution: 1920x1080Midnight Commander running in Gnome Terminal. Orthodox file managers were always popular in Hungary.
2016-05-24
machine: ASUS ZenBook
OS: Arch Linux, Gnome
resolution: 1920x1080Google Chrome’s old look. I rember disliking when they changed away from it but looking at it now it feels dated.
I wrote a simple Chrome extension that forced a YouTube videos to take up the whole tab, a fake fullscreen mode, obsoleted by YouTube’s “Theater mode”.
2019-03-23
Loved the clean look of GMail here.
2023-12-28
OS: Arch Linux
Resolution: 3840x2160
(external monitor)
machine: Lenovo ThinkPad T470Going meta, breaking the fourth wall, the latest and greatest! Creating this very webpage!
2025-01-05
Editing this page again. Not much changed since the previous year.