One thing I didn't like about the old maps from way back in the day is when they shrunk the map a little and put it in front of what I referred to as a "carpet background" (simply because it looked like the carpet in the family room - hey, I was a kid!). I don't know why they did that, and I just don't think it looked good. Even worse is when they had to switch to animated maps, such as satellites or radars (I guess those would be the only animated maps they had back then), which had to be full-frame, and then they went back to static maps with the carpet background...
Why the heck did they do that?!
(If you need a better example of what I'm talking about - just look at the picture a couple of posts up. The map isn't full-screen, but rather shrunk a little with a texture background behind it.)