SQLook – A free online SQLite database manager with a Windows 2000 interface
70 comments
·January 25, 2025hliyan
IshKebab
> interfaces responded instantly
I wish this nostalgic myth would die. Back in the Win 9x days we all had laughably slow spinning disks and hardly any RAM. Interfaces for simple programs like Minesweeper and Notepad were instant, sure. But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not.
Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now than they were in the 90s, mostly thanks to SSDs. (Visual Studio is a notable exception - they really screwed it up after 6.0.)
chungy
It is no myth. Go try a Windows 2000 system and compare it to today. Windows 2000 will respond a lot faster (often instant), even on complex applications.
rekabis
I ran this test myself when another obsolete bit of Y2K kit recently fell into my hands: even with a 256Gb spinning-rust drive and 1Gb of RAM, just using Windows Explorer to copy, move, and delete files took a fraction of the time my main rig did.
And my main rig is a Dell T7920 running Win11 Pro for Workstations 24h2, with a Gen4 TLC NVMe directly attached to the Gen3 PCIe bus (at 7,000/6,900Mbps it can totally saturate its channel), 256Gb of 3200Mhz DDR4 LRDIMMs (4×32Gb), and dual 8C/16T Intel Silver 4110 CPUs.
By any measure, my current rig should have blown the Win2k machine out of the water. The Win2k machine did the file operations in HALF THE F**KING TIME
tl
It's a biased viewpoint, but it's not nostalgia. The following all happened to me:
- 486 Packard Bell that I upgraded ram from 4MB -> 12MB as a kid? Win 3.1 went from being slow period to Windows 95 being fast any time I didn't touch disk or CD-ROM.
- ZSNES on Pentium MMX? Zero lag gameplay with time-travel debugging and full memory view.
- DOS running on a Pentium 4 to support legacy software? Nearly instant everything, especially power on -> usable machine.
You'll notice a common thread. It was possible to outrun the demons of sluggishness back then.
daliz
> Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now than they were in the 90s
I strongly disagree.
narag
But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not.
At any given point, old applications are faster and current applications are slow, slowness being unevenly distributed: if you can pay extra for bigger memory and CPU, you get to use the fast lane.
Also consider that companies balance a number of factors: costs for themselves, time to market, features, what the competition offers. New, more powerful hardware is an opportunity for them to make sloppy software cheaper and first to launch.
exe34
when you click save or when memory has to be paged/loaded, etc, yes.
when it comes to responding to user input - while memory is being swapped, yes.
in contrast, even when the computer wasn't responding, it never lost keystrokes. I'd type ahead and then the characters would appear when it was ready.
now, the windows computer just randomly loses characters and loses focus for no reason. if it's not paying attention when you're typing or clicking, it just won't respond.
IshKebab
Windows doesn't randomly lose characters or focus for me.
FpUser
>"Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now"
Some calculation intensive parts sure are thanks to modern CPU with plenty of cache and RAM and multiple cores.
GUI on the other hand are often atrocious
ksvarma
Very well said, sometimes I feel the modern stack could re-learn and improve.
hot_gril
A lot of modern websites even add an intentional delay for buttons to respond or even load because it "looks nice."
lesuorac
Unsure what exactly counts as "looks nice" but I'll often add an intentional delay to buttons whose actions are near instantaneous but not great to do multiple times so that you don't accidentally click it twice.
hot_gril
I'm thinking something way less necessary. One example off the top of my head is https://www.apple.com/iphone/ with all the text appearing slowly as you scroll down. It's kinda understandable cause it's just the marketing page. But some websites have these slow animations everywhere, both for elements appearing and for button clicks.
miunau
This is an old practice suggested by HCI research going back decades
cjs_ac
It's worth remembering you had far fewer pixels to play with; I remember 800x600 and 1024x768 being the standard monitor resolutions of the day.
Narishma
I think that's a poor excuse. Screen resolutions are higher now but our machines are also orders of magnitude more powerful.
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thomastay
I think it's pretty cool that the source code is all in a single file called app.js, and it's just doing simple DOM manipulations, no React, no minification, no libraries. I like to think it's just written like that too, a gigantic file that the author just iterates on.
GranPC
And that's the "magic" that makes it so snappy and fast to load. I built a web-based game just like that and I am confident that my choice not to use any of the "modern web dev stack" is the reason I managed to hit my 60 FPS performance target on an iPhone 6s in 2024.
hobobaggins
Show HN!
GranPC
I'd have loved to, but because of its nature as a live game show with cash prizes, it required that the user signs up with their phone number, as a way to make botting and multi-account a bit harder. I know that wouldn't go over well with the audience here.
The game is no more, but maybe I could put together a little post talking about the more interesting problems I had to tackle, and showing the animations I am the most proud of. Maybe some day!
akpa1
It's incredibly refreshing to see that you can still build decently complex web apps without a huge swath of JS build tools
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cbxyp
Strange how people are always so negative. Always with the nitpicking. Functionally of course 90s style UX and desktop productivity has always been far higher. Palantir's blueprint UI doesn't even specifically target mobile.
anonzzzies
Yeah, seems many people can just moan online. At least I hope they aren't like this in daily life... It is pretty annoying how, while the HN audience grew steadily, from the 'wow great how you made this' went to 'this is crap and a joke' basically. Or maybe it's my memory and it was always quite bad, but then I don't really want to know; I find shooting down projects, unless they actually are super low effort (while asking money) or claiming blatant untruths (FOSS while it's not), is some kind of insecurity thing broken people do.
Of course reporting bugs is a good thing, but that's not just burning down someone's efforts willy nilly.
gcr
This reminds me a lot of Datasette.io. See example power plant data: https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan...
a-dub
fun fact: sqlite is only about 5.5 months younger than windows 2000...
int_19h
That is not an accurate reproduction of the classic Windows UI. The 3D bevels on buttons and other beveled elements are wrong and make it look more like Motif if anything.
theandrewbailey
They should have used 98.css, but with font-face: Tahoma.
masklinn
Was the font really the only difference between 98 and 2k?
theandrewbailey
I think the colors and icons were slightly different, but 98 + Tahoma gets you most of the way there.
BrouteMinou
Wow, I initially thought that the first dialog box was a screencap of a "real" one...
Impressive!
prezjordan
Thank you :) A real labor of love [0] for me.
karamanolev
Pixel-aligned non-antialiased interfaces make it so much easier to reproduce. Good luck emulating current-gen desktop OS rendering on a different software and hardware stack...
josephcsible
I'd be nervous about giving access to any nonpublic data to a closed-source app that only works while online.
mahoro
I enabled "Offline mode", and it worked. But yes.
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Retr0id
The visualiser tool seems a little broken
(nodes laid out in a long diagonal line, foreign key reference arrows floating around and not "attached")
scoutforge
That UI is... something else. Reminds me of some old database tools I used at Scout Forge, we even wrote some blog posts about similar ones. Think it's actually usable for anything beyond a quick peek?
ksvarma
Wow what a work, this is truly joy to go back in years. Great job.
debarshri
Looks like it is enterprise ready interface.
yas_hmaheshwari
Haha, true
Finally, an interface that matches our enterprise COBOL codebase, perfect for Y2K-compliant enterprises of 1999 :-)
The user experience is so (paradoxically) refreshing. Back then you could fit so much useful information and controls into a single screenful; interfaces responded instantly; it was easy to figure where things are and what I'm looking at. With "modern" UIs, you can't get a big picture of what you're working on because there is so much white space and scrolling; the application is slower than your fingers; with each application, you have to learn the designer's "vision" in order to figure out where things are and what you're looking at.