tell 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!
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@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.
@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 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.
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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
@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!!)
@brooke @dannotdaniel @pwloftus I still can't believe that the original Pokemon games were 373 kb
@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...
@cwebber old mainframes. IPL, all the weird stuff, line printers, magnetic tapes, maybe even the odd punch card
@cwebber Does the ADM 3A count as a computing aesthetic?
@cwebber Really into quirky thinkpads, the MNT reform pocket and whatever that first CERN web server had going on
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@cwebber Alien(s). Just seems eminently practical.
@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!
