Wow, that’s even more frustrating considering it’s conflating an unfashionable UI (which I’d argue is a good thing, since all modern UI trends are towards slick, minimalism-worshiping messes which hide everything from users) and old, provably-flawed technological foundations (like a 16-bit system without things like filesystem access control or memory protection).
I knew this story was false immediately though because no company ever even in 1993 had production server systems which ran a desktop OS like Win 3.1. It just wasn’t up to the task. They would have used NT if anything.
http://www3.alpa.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=IO7kd%2Bfm2Do... shows the system as of 2020. To the parent’s point, it’s actually quite a reasonable UX, with colored outputs, filter banks, and just enough abbreviations and whitespace to balance density with intuitiveness.
But that doesn’t mean this is the only modern design system that meets those requirements. And conflating all modern UI with consumer design trends is an equally frustratingly broad statement.
OK, this is definitely unfashionable looking if your main exposure to apps is the latest doodah on your phone that was literally updated yesterday.
Very standard looking legacy Win32 looking app. Which, admittedly, would have probably look very similar had it been on Windows 3, but is probably running on LTSC Windows 10 or something in reality.
Page 7 (as labeled) of the slides. The tabs and checkboxes layout have a distinctly Win 9x era look/feel. I do agree that it's missing an obvious menu, and the theme for the window decorations reminds me of win 3.1, but that was probably an option for software of that era just as it is in this if someone pushes hard enough.
I knew this story was false immediately though because no company ever even in 1993 had production server systems which ran a desktop OS like Win 3.1. It just wasn’t up to the task. They would have used NT if anything.