So I’ve been tweaking the design of this old thing.
My first computer was a Tandy 1000EX. My parents bought it for the family for Christmas in… 1986? I was in the sixth or seventh grade. I cut my teeth on old MS-DOS programs. I learned to program with GW-BASIC. I had diskfulls of crappy shareware games that I copied from… someone. My family didn’t have a ton of money, and all of my friends had Commodores or Apples, so I didn’t have a lot of friends to pirate stuff from. Instead of WordPerfect, I wrote my high school papers on PC-Write (it was better than the copy of Personal Deskmate that came with the computer - it did Italics!). Our Radio Shack dot-matrix printer did the hard part.
Anyway, I have a nostalgic fondness for MS-DOS and the weird bespoke terminal-based programs that ran on it. I remember that a lot of the programs (like PC-Write and WordPerfect) had a blue background with white text, so that’s what I copied for this site. This font is an exact replica of the font Tandy used in its BIOS.
There was a strange pretentiousness that permeated IBM PC “culture” in those days. Serious business programs gratuitously used CamelCase names. Serifed fonts decorated the thick shrink-wrapped boxes and manuals. Non-gaming software projected a degree of importance they clearly didn’t deserve. People like Peter Norton appeared in business suits or suspenders, with serious looks on their faces, on the cover of glossy magazines. It was a degree of pomposity that was wholly uncalled for given the primitive technology of personal computing in the 1980s.
Anyway, I’m going for “vibes” and “aesthetic” on this site, not for emulation. I could probably make this entire thing fixed text with offsets. Maybe I could find some weird Javascript DOS emulation thing and have a full terminal as a web page if I wanted to get silly with it. But this is more about evoking that early IBM PC feeling than being true to form. Particularly business software for some reason. Maybe evoking the vibe of games like Space Quest or F-15 Strike Eagle is just too hard. Maybe other people have done it already, better than I could do it.
I have a few other websites I’m messing with that have a similar vibe. Perhaps someday I’ll have a whole suite of cheesy, text based applications with ominous CamelCase titles with serifed fonts. And I will appear, very sternly, with rolled up sleeves and a neatly pressed oxford shirt on the homepage.