All the details are just right, from the color palette to the menu separators and edges drawn with fake ASCII 'drawing' characters to the little blip that refreshes the screen line by line. Even the name is perfect: "BOOTSTRA.386" -- eight characters plus three for the extension, all in uppercase.
If you actually used a Mac back in the late 80's / early 90's, this site's output will give you a heady shot of pure, undiluted nostalgia. I wasted half an afternoon once, converting images for my imaginary Hypercard project.
Photoshop will also give you options and allow you to reduce colors down to an 8 bit or 4 bit palette, with a variety of dithering choices, or for the true lofi look (It's 1991 and I used the school's lab scanner for the first time!), no dithering at all.
If you happen to be writing your simulated vintage mac site on a modern mac, vImage (part of the Accelerate framework) supports Atkinson dithering from OS X 10.9 onward via vImageConvert_Planar8to[Planar|Indexed][124].
Not overly useful for one image, but if you have lots of them, it's nice to have a programmatic solution.
Author here. I had no idea this was posted until I just rolled out of bed. Feel free to ask any questions here or hit me up on gchat/skype/aim/facebook/yahoo with the same username as here if that's more comfortable for you. There's also the standard issue tracker and mailing list.
Hey, great looking theme, and it love the attention to detail, but I noticed it's Bootstrap 2x and the site I was going to put it on is bootstrap 3x at the moment.
Any plans/progress porting this or rewriting it root bootstrap 3x, or should I build anything I want this one as 2x?
I realize this is a ridiculous question (totally different platforms), but is this something that could eventually be made into a tumblr theme? I would guess that tens of thousands of people would download it day one.
It looks old, it looks comical, but I KNOW WHAT TO DO!
Less pixels, and less colours, means greater usability! This is the greatest application of Bootstrap I have ever seen. It is a shame that more websites don't look like this (in all seriousness).
This is undeniably neat but I am curious if you "know what to do" because you have a lot of experience using applications that looked this way largely by necessity. I don't think the average computer user would favor this type of aesthetic on any level.
When I was growing up with computers, interfaces like this were on their way out. So to me it just looks clunky and messy. Other than inspiring nostalgia and impressing me with the amount of work that surely went into creating it, I don't think this theme has much real world application.
These themes that attempt to replicate the look and feel of a GUI are pretty gimmicky in nature (ever been to a terrible blog that tries to look like the OS X GUI or worse... one of the Windows GUIs?). This one just happens to be really high quality.
I am curious if you "know what to do" because you have a lot of experience using applications that looked this way largely by necessity.
Of course. In the "nature vs. nurture" argument, there is no room for computers. It is all nurture here. Moreover, current interfaces derive from the design choices illustrated here.
Thats pretty impressive! I mean its a BBS with more than 1.5 million registered users, for gods sake. Also there is some creative ASCII art in there, go check it out.
I love this so much. Everything about the text mode of PCs (that is, what we used to call "IBM compatibles") is burnt into my brain at the deepest levels. Seeing this is like a jolt of electricity.
If you ask me to picture "what does a byte look like?", I am not going to think of binary or hex, I am going to instantly imagine the "extended ASCII" of code page 437.
Very nice, it's so convincing my first reaction was to use the left-right cursor keys to change the selected menu option! (that would be a cool enhance by the way).
I instantly tried to use the arrow keys as well. Hopefully it becomes an option. Having the scroll/refresh rate adjustable would be neat too, it seems 2400 baud, but 9600-14.4 was common too. Very cool otherwise!
Nope, that would be the rather unique text mode of the BBC Micro, which allowed you to do things like double-height letters. AFAIK, only Ceefax and the BBC Micro supported that.
This is definitely based on the standard EGA/VGA text mode (originally 80x25 characters) used by DOS. Mode 0x10 IIRC.
This is also using the standard codepage 437, which includes the characters for single and double borders. You could also rewrite the symbol table to make custom characters, which is what Norton Utilities and others did.
This is called Teletext[1] (or in german: Videotext). It still widely used i guess. Even me sometimes used it to get informations about the sheduled TV-Program if not cellphone/tablet is in reach ;)
I think it's actually EGA, but it's definitely not CGA. CGA only supports 4 colours and you can tell immediately from the dark blue that it's not CGA, because that's not one of the 4. There are also at least 5 colours shown, all of which happen to be from the standard EGA palette.
VGA generally used the same text modes as EGA and very few people actually had an EGA, so referring to it as a VGA mode is an understandable mistake.
There were actually some VGA-specific text modes (80x30 mode for example) as well as SVGA modes, but they weren't really used much because the EGA modes were good enough, more widely compatible, and IIRC the 80x30 mode was noticeably slower.
Also IIRC, 80x30 mode used a slightly different font than this one, which is why I think it's the usual 80x25 EGA rather than one of the other modes.
You're right. I just looked it up, it seems I misremembered the CGA/EGA palette specs.
I'm pretty sure this is based on the standard EGA/VGA font, which is 8x14 pixels, whereas CGA only supported 8x8. Characters like A, N and M look noticeably more pixellated around the diagonals in CGA mode.
This is very much the one everyone would recognise from the VGA era, although it's actually an EGA mode.
I had a Sanyo MBC-550 with a green-screen CRT in the late 80s. The retro coolness factor is overrated IMO. I much prefer my MBP Retina screen without phosphor trails.
LOL, the turbo button when the front of the PC displayed the number of MHz the computer was operating at, and you could slow it down so you could play old games. Good times.
Interesting bit of trivia: the MHz LED display on the front of most PC cases was typically configured by jumpers and wired directly to the turbo button; it did not read the actual speed from the motherboard. So if you wanted, you could make it say "HI" for high speed and "LO" for low speed.
Yep, I remember spending an afternoon reverse-engineering the jumper configuration to change the numbers to match the CPU I had just upgraded. I may still have the diagram I drew somewhere. And I thought I didn't have enough free time back then.
As a kid I was fascinated by the fact that turbo button was actually a brake button but there was a perverse incentive to call it turbo because of the psychological effect.
First: Kudos. That is easily the coolest thing I've seen this month.
Everything "felt" like a fancy over-done BBS of the early 90s in the way that the page loaded slowly, but I'm curious why you chose the second swipe of the cursor over the screen. I don't remember my PC from 8088-80386 ever doing that. Am I misremembering and was this in reference to some platform from the 80s that I didn't use?
I literally experienced a sense memory from viewing this. I could smell the slight smell that old, hot CRT monitors emitted -- probably some volatile mix of things that give you cancer.
I see this faithfully reproduces that the cursor takes one pass to write the text, then flashes through a second faster pass. I remember seeing that sometimes.
Question: On the real systems where that occurred, what was the second pass doing? It never seemed to change anything. (No guesses, please. I'm looking for someone who knows.)
Am I the only one that noticed the irony of presenting a Javascript-required website with the self-promotional phrase: Made for everyone. Bootstrap was made to not only look and behave great in the latest desktop browsers (as well as IE7!), but in tablet and smartphone browsers via responsive CSS as well.?
I will have to check this out for the next version of Sixtten Colors (an ANSI and ASCII art gallery). We use a similar font, but it is far from bootstrapped.
While I'm here.. make the scrolling only scroll by character boundries, for a more authentic feel - the header shouldn't overlap by say half a character, since textmode was cell based.
All the details are just right, from the color palette to the menu separators and edges drawn with fake ASCII 'drawing' characters to the little blip that refreshes the screen line by line. Even the name is perfect: "BOOTSTRA.386" -- eight characters plus three for the extension, all in uppercase.
THANK YOU.