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 hardware design wise I love the early 2000s (GameCube, GBA, iBook G3).
On the interface side I am drawn towards neocities/tumblr style lo-fi/pastel/pixel art aesthetics.
@cwebber VT220 - obsolicious 😋️
@cwebber I loved amiga workbench 3.1 for UI and for case design I think the SGI octane is pretty
I 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.
@cwebber I really liked earlier MacOS X when everything was skeuomorphic and looked like you’d be able to feel the textures if you touched the screen
@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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@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!
@cwebber Star Trek's LCARS!
So colorful and bold, with nice shapes. https://www.thelcars.com/
