tell me what your favorite computing aesthetic was or is.

[cwebber@social.coop]

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!

[ladytel@masto.hackers.town]

@cwebber I dig the aesthetic from ghost in the shell stand alone complex.

[kiloku@burnthis.town]

@cwebber Star Trek's LCARS!

So colorful and bold, with nice shapes. https://www.thelcars.com/

[dave@alvarado.social]

@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.

[adriano@lile.cl]

@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!

[jeeger@mastodon.social]

@cwebber Alien(s). Just seems eminently practical.

[seirdy@pleroma.envs.net]

@cwebber@social.coop 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.

[gabboman@gabboman.xyz]

@cwebber@social.coop

I 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@mas.to]

@cwebber Really into quirky thinkpads, the MNT reform pocket and whatever that first CERN web server had going on

[lopta@mastodon.social]

@cwebber Does the ADM 3A count as a computing aesthetic?

[dfstarshine@icosahedron.website]

@cwebber Beige hardware and desktop-centric interfaces with visible pixels.

[danana_dread@tech.lgbt]

@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.

[veronica_claire@chaosfem.tw]

@cwebber lately, inexpensive, but this:
https://chaosfem.tw/@veronica_claire/116644420088209068

[carto@mastodon.online]

@cwebber old mainframes. IPL, all the weird stuff, line printers, magnetic tapes, maybe even the odd punch card

[grace@social.lol]

@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...

[pwloftus@pwl.farted.net]

@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.

[danana_dread@tech.lgbt]

@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.

[drj@typo.social]

@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.

[skyfaller@jawns.club]

@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@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cwebber Nokia E71