@cwebber Utopian Scholastic

@cwebber the original Cray supercomputer with a sofa round the outside

@cwebber "Atari Handheld, ATM Easy Money" - John Connor

@cwebber Max Headroom - trashy cyberpunk postmodernism - 3d wireframe + greenscreen database interfaces, old typewriter keyboards and bell telephone handsets.

2nd Place - Existenz - VR cyberdecks made from pieces of crab shells and fish bones.

@cwebber After cringing hard, seeing early #Unix Window Managers like twm and fvwm, it was such a breath of fresh air to see #WindowMaker. I rocked a WindowMaker desktop from about 1998 to about 2002, in #Debian #linux

@cwebber uh uhhh wireframe 3d models

@cwebber The Cray 2. It was physically striking, especially with the original Flurinert towers, and it was peak computer architecture design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2

@cwebber all the computer hardware setups in Serial Experiments: Lain.

For example...

'90s japanese mobile phone culture. Computing never looked that cute since.

https://www.yokogaomag.com/editorial/texting-in-the-90s-japans-retro-futuristic-phone-culture

@cwebber

@cwebber pixel graphics and square boxen.

@cwebber Clicky keyboards with high-gloss color-coded keycaps! Others have already mentioned the Alien movies, which (along with the game Isolation) have some of that. Something about the tactile nature of it and definitely the fact it can be operated without looking - even though my current keyboard is a very quiet mechanical one.

Related - I liked the era when UI buttons looked like buttons, had some bas relief to them, and depressed with clicked. Aqua on OS X. Windows prior to XP. NeXTstep and Irix. I don't need a full skeuomorphic setup, but today's flat design is boring.

But I also really dig the idea of complex multitouch interfaces. Drilling down into data via zoom, rearranging things with a swipe, and more. I feel like we haven't done much in this area - but maybe that's because it's been tried in-house at Apple, Microsoft, etc. and found to have serious downsides. And I'll admit a lot of my love is nostalgia from all the sci-fi I watched growing up in the 80s and 90s.

@cwebber in the early 90s I made a shoulder strap for one of my C64s and ran a fake video cable from it to some tricked out ski goggles for a costume cyberdeck. I still think about it often.

@cwebber UDE should have become a thing. Fond 2004 memories https://udeproject.sourceforge.net/

@cwebber There's a particular retrofuturistic vibe I really like. The sort of things you see in Serial Experiments Lain, Digimon Tamers, Ghost in the Shell, Tron Legacy...

aurahack and Lena Raine made a Cocoon theme I've been using along the same lines, great vibe: https://radicaldreamland.bandcamp.com/track/phantomaos-advanced-computer-system

@cwebber web os on the last pre

@cwebber early 1990s hypercard, with all the crisp little b&w pixel art icons and careful dithering and tiny sound clips. resedit. using NCSA telnet to log in to an AT&T unix box from an aging mac in the library and read mail in pine.

mIRC running on windows 95. i have a million of those MDI windows-in-windows open. the font is fixedsys. a custom wav file plays when a message comes in on ICQ. in the background, i'm browsing the web with lynx in one of those terrible quasi-terminal windows.