Retrotechnology Media archives actual screenshots from real hardware spanning 1983 to the early 2000s, covering VisiOn, GEM, SunTools, NeXTstep, OS/2, RISC OS, and more.
Key Takeaways
Screenshots are captured from original hardware with documented aspect-ratio corrections, not emulators, covering systems like Sun 2/120, Acorn Archimedes, DEC VAXstation, and SGI IRIS.
GEM Desktop history is concretely visible: GEM 1.2 shows overlapping windows; GEM 3.0 shows the crippled post-Apple-lawsuit two-tiled-window design.
Amiga HAM6 compositing, IRIS mex, NeWS PostScript display server, and TI microExplorer Lisp environments are all documented with resolution and file-size metadata.
Each entry includes year, resolution, file format, and system configuration, making it useful as a reference for historical UI research or period-accurate recreation.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters flagged the site lacks HTTPS, a basic friction point for anyone sharing or visiting links in 2026.
A companion collection, guidebookgallery.org/screenshots, was surfaced as a complementary bookmark alongside this site.
This URL has appeared on HN at least twice before, in 2017 and 2023, each time generating substantive discussion.
Notable Comments
@lynndotpy: flags guidebookgallery.org/screenshots as a parallel archive worth bookmarking alongside this one.
@tomhow: links two prior HN threads on the same resource from Dec 2017 and June 2023.
