What settings looked like before smartphones

A settings menu from 1999 fits in your head. We measured eight systems that are no longer made — Windows 98, Mac OS 9, Windows XP, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Firefox OS and KaiOS — and the thing that stands out is not how primitive they were. It is how shallow.

The desktops of 1999

Windows 98 SE carried 476 settings rows, nested three levels deep. Mac OS 9 carried 262, also three deep.

Three levels is the headline. It means every setting on the machine was at most three clicks from the Control Panel, and the whole configuration surface could be learned by wandering around it on a wet afternoon. Nobody needed a search box because there was nothing to search for.

Windows XP, five years later, is barely larger at 463 rows and four levels. The explosion had not started yet.

The phones that lost

The discontinued mobile platforms cluster in a narrow band:

That band — roughly 330 to 640 rows — is about where a modern smartwatch sits. A phone from 2012 had the configuration surface of a watch from today.

iOS 6.1 is in that list for a reason. It is the same product line as the 4,555-row iOS 27, thirteen releases earlier, and it is indistinguishable in size from its dead competitors. Whatever iOS won on, it was not settings.

What they did not have to configure

Reading these menus, the absences are more striking than the contents. There is no per-app permission model, because apps were trusted or not installed. There is no notification configuration beyond sounds, because notifications were sounds. There is no screen-time or wellbeing section, no privacy dashboard, no biometrics, no per-app battery accounting, no cloud account to reconcile.

What they do have, that modern systems mostly lost: direct hardware control. Windows 98 will let you set an IRQ. Mac OS 9 lets you allocate memory to an application by hand. Symbian exposes the network access point per application. These are not settings a modern system hides — they are settings a modern system does not have, because the decision moved into the operating system.

The trade

It is tempting to read the numbers as decline — 476 rows you could learn, replaced by 4,555 you cannot. That is not quite it. Most of what got added is control over things that did not exist: which app can see your location, what happens to a notification while you are driving, how much of the battery a background process may spend.

The honest summary is a trade. Older menus were learnable and gave you fewer things to decide. Newer ones give you far more control and are no longer learnable, which is why every one of them now ships with a search box — and why a path written down in an article stops working within a release or two.

Both halves of that trade are visible in one place here: you can open Windows 98 and Windows 11 side by side and walk the same journey in each.

Where these came from

The discontinued systems are the hardest part of this catalogue to get right, because the vendor documentation often went offline with the product. Each one here is built from the system’s own source where it was open — Firefox OS from Gaia, for instance — and from archived manuals where it was not. Rows with no documented screen behind them are left as dead ends rather than invented, and counted publicly.

If you find something wrong in one of these, it is worth telling us: the old systems are where errors are most likely and least likely to be noticed.