Christine Lemmer-Webbertell me what your favorite computing aesthetic was or is. a real one or even fictional!
go ahead! you're being given permission! infodump away in my replies here!
George Liquor, American@cwebber Vectrex. That's it
Dana@liquor_american @cwebber Some day, when I have money and time enough, I'm going to finish my Vectrex-esque webgame engine.
I absolutely love CRT beam-based vector graphics.
rich
Daniel Carosone@danana_dread @liquor_american @cwebber
I'm slightly hesitant to post this in case it spoils your ambitions, but..
Look at the game Utopia Must Fall and the v99 engine it uses. My favourite thing in ages.
/usr/local/goth @ home@cwebber I dig the aesthetic from ghost in the shell stand alone complex.
Kiloku - Secretário do Caos@cwebber Star Trek's LCARS!
So colorful and bold, with nice shapes. https://www.thelcars.com/
Adriano@cwebber The computer interfaces in Alien, Aliens (and Alien Isolation) were so well done, part of the whole æsthetic of those ships. They were so believable!
zenrenji
jeeger
Dave Alvarado@cwebber Power Mac G5.
When they were in stores, they displayed the air cooled model with a transparent side so you could see how the whole thing was laid out. Absolutely brilliant cooling system. IIRC they were the front runners on having separate cooling channels for the CPUs and the expansion cards, fully mesh cases, and a bunch of other stuff that is common now.
So stunningly beautiful.
D. Moonfire@cwebber The tactile display from Star Trek: Discovery. I love the idea of having physical buttons that I could use without looking down, coupled with dynamic displays that were relevant to the features needed.
And the whole projecting on glasses or inside eyeballs. I have poor vision and want really big displays, but they are so obnoxious (my mom used to have two 65" curved monitors on her desk).
Seirdy@cwebber not a visual aesthetic, but an auditory one: Windows XP era sounds. they were a bit goofy and had personality, but not enough to be too annoying.
ok a little annoying. but still.
FeralRobots
gabboman the wafrn devI liked what windows 7 was going for. It felt like a "ok lets take the cool parts of windows xp and windows vista and lets make it right this time". No not the update the system and crash it forever and require a full reinstall part (even tho that paid for a few breakfasts and stuff in my life).
I also liked initial gnome 3 when it still had icons in the desktop (it had icons in the desktop right, im not making that one up?). It was good
Nowdays I enjoy KDE a lot (I kenjoy kde ka klot)
Fictional one: the predator coutdown in the bombs in alien versus predator. random lights. but less lights less time yeah
Xandru ⁂
lopta
Sophie 🏳️⚧️ 🌜@cwebber Beige hardware and desktop-centric interfaces with visible pixels.
Veronica
Kushnerin pelottava enkeli@cwebber old mainframes. IPL, all the weird stuff, line printers, magnetic tapes, maybe even the odd punch card
🏳️⚧️ Grace 🏳️⚧️@cwebber I think this is far enough out that I can talk about it without risk of a lawsuit...
One of my favorites is a prototype computer interface that Microsoft was working on in the early 2010s.
I was in Redmond to pitch MS on a partnership with JCPenney. Weird right?
Myself and one other designer (I think we were both interns at the time) put together a proof of concept for social shopping powered by the Kinect. We had leveraged the Xbox avatar design language and interspersed it with real video footage so people could virtually try on clothes and have their friends in as avatars to give feedback. It was based on the feeling that the "1-vs-100" game gave - this ability to get a group together and share a moment in time.
We also had a working prototype for contactless shopping by leveraging RFID tags so you could toss all the clothes you want in a bag and just put the bag on the Microsoft Surface table to scan in all the items and manage payment, as well as tap in to the JCP online store if you needed a different size or color sent to your house as part of the order.
After the pitch, they took us on a tour of their innovation lab, and the thing that stuck with me most was a desk of fully curved acrylic. I don't think they had OLED because the embedded screens were only on flat surfaces, but it was mind blowing.
The device turned on and was mainly controlled via proximity. You walked up and it turned on, much like something out of Iron Man, and then you could put your hands over different spaces to activate them. It felt like I was using the computers in Minority Report.
I still think about that and wish it saw the light of day. Everything was intuitive and made me excited for technology.... back when tech was something that was going to make lives better...
The Doctor
Patrick Loftus 🖖
@cwebber Probably just a first love thing. Atari 800XL, attached floppy, and a few controllers.
My sisters and I always fought over the red handled joystick.
An old CRT with dials and a button for switching between Black & White and Color display. The color didn't always cooperate.
Brooke Vibber 
ɹ uɐp 
we had the regular 800, and my friend had the XL
I was so jealous, though I'm not sure it made any actual difference.
What i really wanted was an Atari ST, which one of my Dad's work friends kids had, and it ran this insanely awesome game called BRATACCUS
And then I wanted an Amiga, and then I wanted a NES. But no, we stuck with the friggin' Atari 800 (and a 2600) all the way up until we got an 80286.
we may have have 2 disk drives and a custom "cartidge emulator" circuit board which allowed for playing pirated games. who can say
sigh
Brataccas Quick Play - Atari ST
@dannotdaniel @brooke @cwebber That game reminds me of Spy vs Spy.
My father may have had a friend who gifted him damn-near-every piece of software written on 5.25 disks - not saying he did just may have.
They also may have had a boot loader to select which application to run when multiple could fit on a disk, with hand written labels for the catalog.
Personal favorites were Preppie, Pacific Coast Highway, and Jumpman. I did waste a lot of time trying to beat E.T. - never did.
I can still hear the sound of that drive roaring as it loaded something.
@dannotdaniel @pwloftus @cwebber i think of stuff we used when i was a kid, only a couple of games actually made use of the full 64 KiB RAM on the 800XL (the 800 only went up to 48 KiB)
of which one was Sublogic Flight Simulator 2.0 (cousin of the modern Microsoft Flight Simulator line) which required the additional memory to display the wings/tail in the side/rear views, and to enable radio navigation features
(I still can't believe how much they packed into that flight sim for 8-bit computers!!)
@cwebber @dannotdaniel @pwloftus utterly ridiculous how little storage we made do with
back when pixels were the size of rocks and bitmaps were small ;) <3
@brooke @cwebber @dannotdaniel Meanwhile in 2026 - got any spare terabytes for this uncompressed multilingual audio for your game?
You only need 1 of the languages? Too bad.
Language packs and high res textures should be optional DLC. Just ranting but it would be a low-hanging fruit of optimization.
@pwloftus @cwebber @dannotdaniel you jest about terabytes, but microsoft flight simulator (2020 edition) was notorious for a 100+ GiB base install that ballooned to the better part of a terabyte if you installed enough add-ons
they rearchitected some stuff in the 2024 edition to stream more stuff over the network and only cache what you're actively using on disk
(which, naturally was itself controversial in the simmer community because they were also notorious for bad server download / streaming performance for users in many countries. some people are like "yeah i'll set aside a terabyte for flight simulator gimme the download ahead of time so my flight time is clear and consistent")
I have to ask - what were your favorite atari titles?
Couple of my faves:
- Bruce Lee, obviously
🏆 - F-15 Strike Eagle - the only sim I had.. but I think an apache helo one also existed
- Rally Speedway for 2-player offroading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_Speedway
of course at my buddie's house with the XL... I don't think he could play the pirated games... we mostly played Donkey Kong..
bri@dannotdaniel phew, i don’t think i ever played an atari port of bruce lee (had quite a few vcs titles but much less for the 8-bit computers) but i sure did log a lot of hours on the c64… brutal game 😹
@dannotdaniel @pwloftus @cwebber
Top favorite to this day:
* Rescue on Fractalus!
I regularly pull this one out and just stream myself rescuing pilots for an hour lol
* Sublogic Flight Simulator
really fascinated me though I was *terrible* at landing
* Ballblazer
had great graphics and 'twicthy' gameplay but it didn't hold up well imo
* Dig-Dug
I played a *lot* of dig-dug.
* Ghostbusters
Incredibly hard, not sure we ever actually beat the game. Just like real life! But by god you get sick of hearing the 'Ghostbusters' theme playing 24/7 during play
and of course:
* Star Raiders II
I really enjoyed this even though it was quite different from the original (because it was actually designed as a Last Starfighter media tie-in and got repurposed when the license fell through)
* Star Raiders (the original)
I spent many hours as a child zapping zylons.
@dannotdaniel @brooke @cwebber I may or may not have many of these loaded up on a steam deck as well.
Kelson
David JONES@cwebber I'm in the middle of a field trip (back) to 1990s X11. xedit, xman, .Xresources. I've always admired the bicolour-but-reasonable-resolution aesthetic (black-and-white 1024x768 say, but even 800x600 was pretty ok). And everything it just So Fing Clear. Scrollbars! Grab handles! I also like the Macs from this era (Hypercard and so on). And I have a soft spot for the 4-level gray of NeXT (and BeOS?) though i never used them.
@cwebber I have a lot of nostalgia for using my grandpa's old IBM computer as a kid, with the 3.25 inch floppy disks, and an amber monochrome monitor.
The satisfying *kachunk* of inserting a program or data disk, and the springy tactility of ejecting a disk and catching it in your palm. There was something nice about switching disks too.
Caffeine Canidae@danana_dread @cwebber I love those old IBM PCs! I've been wanting to get a monochome monitor for a good while now, but currently haven't been able to find one for a good price. I do have a full IBM 300GL PC setup though! Need to make more use of it...
Nelson@cwebber I really like the human-made janky computer systems from the Xenowealth series by Tobias S. Buckell, including "Ragamuffin". Basically, almost everyone in this universe uses advanced alien computer technology through neural interfaces, but anyone who opposes the alien overlords doesn't dare use it because the aliens can take control of it. So the "ragalamina" is old two-dimensional computer tech based on systems we'd recognize, which humans understand and can make trustworthy.
Conchoid
silverwizard@silverwizard @cwebber I couldn't afford back then but I got a secondhand for a gift
Bridget
Michael BaconI don't know that I can pick just one, but . . .
WordPerfect 3.2 with the little plastic multicolor guide that slotted over the left-side function keypad.
X11 with Motif widgets running on a GIGANTIC 19 inch Sun workstation monitor
The amber monochrome screens on an old VT420 terminal.
My old giant trackball from like 2004 that was about the size of a pool cue and a really comfortable hand rest.
The white 11 inch MacBook from like 2003.
The 2013 series of MacBook Pros. Flawless.
The golden age of Lenovo ThinkPads, including the little X1s that were such great little low power workhorses.
Flip phones. Seriously. My old ultraruggedized Casio flip was such a great device.
LaTeX's default typesetting output. I love that I can get it with Markdown and pandoc now.
ANSI animations and Operation Overkill II on BBS doors over a 2400 baud modem.
EDIT: OH. And workstations from like 1996-2004 that were super well designed for field service. Easy to open and service. LOVE.
Owl Eyes@MichaelTBacon @cwebber "X11 with Motif widgets" - to my mind, they were a nightmare. MacOS 9 UI widgets were awesome, IMHO. An example is seen on the lauriewired.com site.
@MichaelTBacon @cwebber well we both agree on Wordperfect
@MichaelTBacon @cwebber I'm currently using MotifWM! Been loving it! Customised it to look like Solaris 9 actually! Absolutely great list though
unsponsor
серафими многоꙮчитїи@cwebber VT220 - obsolicious 😋️
Markus Osterhoff@cwebber Of course my 9-pin dot matrix printer; I'll use it on Saturday again to print QR codes: