Microsoft 90s splash screens were an art form of their own

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Upper_Zucchini_4440@reddit

I was a big fan of the 2003 office splash screen: not too minimal yet techie enough to feel timeless.

I held on for so long to that version that, when a teen saw the splash screen on my then new Windows 11 beta install, I was asked "is that a new update?"

Unfortunately I lost the backup files to the compatibility service pack, and most repositories I've tried download broken files. I'm only left with the original dvds for the professional version and sp1 and therefore unable to properly work with the new XML enabled files.

Also, these days i use Google workplace most of the time. Gosh, I miss the old office UI without the silly ribbon menus!

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WeepingScorpion1982@reddit

Well, now I need to bloat my retro systems because of these splash screens. :)

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Rementoire@reddit

And the dithering from those glorious bitmap colours.

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pixelbart@reddit

It had to look absolutely glorious on a high-end 256-color screen, but still classy on a 16-color display.

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NiewinterNacht@reddit

256 color were far from state of the art in the Windows 95-era.

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0fruitjack0@reddit

ah yes back when they cared

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JasonMckin@reddit

Ah, but you have to show the different versions of splash screen fonts and designs! There were multiple generations of these remarkable designs. I can think of at least 4 of them I think from the 1990s. Here is an example of a previous generation: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/6x-fdaec9fc275df796653d04e07efa1db9-Microsoft%20Word%206%20for%20Windows%20-%20Splash.png

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ussaro@reddit

Win Word 6.0 is by far my favorite splash screen. So iconic.

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hydraulix989@reddit

Such a fancy looking pen

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Popular-Regular3950@reddit

and Excel https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/11c387c2-a3c3-ae28-1a11-c3a4e284a2ef/2618352e-43e2-82ac-11c3-a4c2a83d7054, true masterpieces!

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Ok_Study3236@reddit

I can literally smell my school's computer room looking at that word splash!

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Useful_Resolution888@reddit

That one sparked a wave of nostalgia.

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DoctorOfTheCookie@reddit

Hell all splash screens are a lost art form

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Ok-Hotel-8551@reddit

Back then there was a proffesion called designer

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DangKilla@reddit

It’s crazy to think you shared the full resolution images

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mito@reddit

I miss those. It's all flat, boring and utterly soulless now.

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Aleni9@reddit

If you look very closely you can notice that this is completely flat too. It's a matter of style

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CoffeePuddle@reddit

I feel like I might've missed a joke, but "flat" here is being used as a metaphor for lacking creative depth. E.g. a lack of colour, dynamism, or complexity.

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Aleni9@reddit

Flat in design discussions (designer here) is often and constantly used by younger generations to complain about the move from skeumorphism / 3d of the 2000s to what is a simpler and in fact flatter way of designing logos, UIs and in general digital products. It's a very common trope actually

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raducupop@reddit

Yes, i miss this.

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aNostalgicTrooper@reddit

This made me smile a lot

And now we have MicroSlop364-andAbit

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themightyug@reddit

My favourite was the Windows NT 4 Workstation splash screen

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mallardtheduck@reddit

Technically that wasn't implemented as a "splash screen" (which were displayed by an application as it loaded). It was the (default) desktop wallpaper for the profile used for the login screen.

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themightyug@reddit

It wasn't just the desktop background, I seem to remember it was there during startup before the login screen

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mallardtheduck@reddit

Yes, the desktop background loaded before the window appeared, but that's still how it was displayed.

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CoffeePuddle@reddit

That's how I remember it, but I've found my memories of old software especially are prone to corruption!

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WretchedGibbon@reddit

Yeah that was good. I always liked the implication that NT4 was "higher" than W95 that just had the clouds.

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TrannosaurusRegina@reddit

Wow!

Fascinating observation!

It really does look elite, which is saying something, because Windows 95 is so iconic and beautiful already!

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JJDoes1tAll@reddit

*with Internet Explorer

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TheLowestFormOfHumor@reddit

When Microsoft was actively trying to destroy the competition (Mosaic / Netscape) and eventually attracted some government heat lol

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themightyug@reddit

I remember it will. They pivoted from 'the web will never take off' to 'destroy all other browsers' very suddenly

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themightyug@reddit

For that new-fangled interwebs

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TheGillos@reddit

The 90s tech space had a big 50s pop aesthetic, you see it in fashion and music at the time too.

Just go back and look at PC World magazine from the mid-90s and there are all these cartoons with a style reminiscent of these splash screens.

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CoffeePuddle@reddit

I think dithering in low-colour graphics lent themselves to art that used the Ben Day process.

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TheGillos@reddit

Huh, I hadn't considered that, but good point.

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fadingsignal@reddit

One of my daydreams is to be born 10 years earlier and be a graphic designer at Microsoft or one of the other big tech companies in the early-mid 1990s.

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ZetaformGames@reddit

I miss everything about vintage computing in general. Up until the early 2010s we still had computer manufacturers trying new things. I remember some HP laptops having fingerprint readers, as well as one that could double up as a media player while the power's off. Nowadays, every computer feels the same, and the software tells the same story.

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BCProgramming@reddit

Some products actually had variations to the splash Screen. Visual Basic is the main one that comes to mind but I suspect Visual C++ also probably followed a similar approach.

You can extract splash screens usually with stuff like Resource Hacker. This gets you the "base" splash screen bitmap. Sometimes additional info, copyright, licensed user, etc. is drawn on top of that for the actual splash screen.

Image splashes were introduced to VB in version 4. Before that the "splash screen" was kind of just a box of text. VB4 added a image splash, and it had three versions for each Edition, which ended up being more or less consistent with how they did it in later versions too.

VB4:

Standard Edition

Professional Edition

Enterprise Edition

VB5:

Standard Edition 16-color, 256-color

Professional Edition 16-color, 256-color

Enterprise Edition 16-color, 256 Color

VB6:

Standard Edition 16-color, 256-color

Professional Edition 16-color, 256-color

Enterprise Edition 16-color, 256 Color

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lukes123@reddit

Ugh, Imgur. “Content not viewable in your region”

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BCProgramming@reddit

Fine, I changed them to my webhost

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ZetaformGames@reddit

I learned the hard way, too... I can't believe the world we're living in.

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karlexceed@reddit

Oh cracked VB6 EE... How I loved thee back in like 2002. The prog scene, lol

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Ok_Study3236@reddit

This thread is pure gold. Do you collect these? Someone needs to do a splash page archive, they're so immediately emotive

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BCProgramming@reddit

I found the multiple splash screens a long time ago when I was messing around writing a resource editor program in VB6. Opening the VB6 executables and DLL files was pretty natural when screwing around with it, and I stumbled on the "other" splash screens. That's why I knew they were there. I didn't have images for them so I literally extracted them manually using Resource Hacker for that comment.

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Distinct-Question-16@reddit

Honestly, I think those first Office user interfaces were the best because they looked serious. Softening the buttons and replacing the dockable toolbars with these "ribbons" ended blending the content with the toolbars, making it more distracting and less serious. And the splash screen designs were the most correct to be presented in 256 colors, so yes sort of.

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MWink64@reddit

IIRC, those puzzle pieces each represented a different program from the Office suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access). Back then, they were so expensive you had the option of buying them separately.

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Fluid_Mouse524@reddit

The splash screens lowered your expectation immediately.

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ThaWeeknd702@reddit

What was Exposition? I’m in my 40s and have never heard of it.

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gcc-O2@reddit

Guess you had the floppy disk version of Win95 or just didn't go exploring around the cd-rom :D

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pabskamai@reddit

I remember getting excited from just seeing these screens, they were indeed a work of art. What do we have now? 🤬

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crazyguy5880@reddit

The fun for me for most software updates (especially like adobe, macromedia, aol etc) were the new splash screen every version :)

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Background-Wafer-548@reddit

Microsoft Exposition is a CD-ROM based multimedia catalog of Microsoft products that allows you to explore information on business applications, games, reference materials, programming languages, and children's software products available from Microsoft.

That is quite a splash screen for a simple catalog!

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crazyguy5880@reddit

I used to love the spinning globe in IE 5(?) or at least the msn version. So pretty.

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teknosophy_com@reddit

Don't forget Microsoft Multimedia Jumpstart!

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Cthulwutang@reddit

And the startup sounds!

https://a.co/d/0h9dpuWp

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PolloCool@reddit

https://archive.org/details/ms-exposition-win95id

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davehope@reddit

I loved the parody ones from the time.

NT DoesntWorkstation was a classic.

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Important-Shallot-49@reddit

the best one was in the NT 4.0, i still use this as a wallpaper sometimes (on a solid dark cyan background).

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giantsparklerobot@reddit

I swear NT4's splash screen was cool it would make the room colder when I saw it.

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Difficult_Abroad_477@reddit

I’ve asked people at Microsoft directly who created the splash screens and box art for their 90s and early 2000’s products and all I got is dead silence. But I’m suspecting it’s outside contracted.

It obviously went high end and consistent starting with Office 95 and Windows 95. In Windows 3x and 2x generation of releases you barely saw the splash screens and they were just little boxes with basic information. The likely purpose of the more fancy artwork is because the apps got bigger and had more code to load into memory, so you had to show something fancy to occupy the users time while it loaded up.

The latest version of Office 365 has become so basic it just shows the respective icons while the web versions have an animation for Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and OneNote. We really have moved on from the fun and whimsy of these products.

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