Vintage 1980s DOS inspired Twitter Bootstrap theme | Hacker News Reader

Vintage 1980s DOS inspired Twitter Bootstrap theme

github.com

163 pointsakshayagarwal34 comments

This is a really great theme! I love it how even the button clicks are authentic.

Some suggestions:

1. To get a real DOS feeling, the number of characters per line should be limited to (exactly) 80, and the font size should be increased accordingly.

2. Links to headers [1] within the document make the browser scroll to the header text itself, rather than the top of the surrounding colored box.

3. This is mostly a "QBasic" style. There are other styles, such as:

3.1. The "Turbo Vision" style (used by the Turbo Pascal IDE itself, and many other Turbo Pascal applications using the Turbo Vision framework.)

3.2. The "Norton Commander / Nortin Utilities" style

3.3. The "DOS command line" style (command.com)

etc.

[1] https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/components.html#...

Strangely I vividly remember setting (S)VGA text modes to higher counts than 80 per line for such UIs. Maybe my memory fails me and I'm mixing things up with Debian text mode installs?

Perhaps you ran mode to set the columns and rows?

Yes, some of the tools did, but the ones mentioned here didn't (QBasic, Norton Commander/Utilities, Turbo Pascal/Vision).

Norton Utilities did play some interesting games with modifying the VGA character set in real time, implementing a mouse cursor over the text mode. But it was still 80x25.

However, some if the programs adapted to 80x50 if you enabled that mode before (or while?) starting them.

Some cards (Tseng, and others too) allowed 132 column text modes, some even 160.

scaling doesn't work because our screens are different form factors these days. You'd get really fat characters (I've tried it).

2. it's a bug ... I'll fix it

3. sure. it's the microsoft style to be more specific. the manufacturers had their own 'branding' in this sense. I had to pick one of them due to time being a finite resource.

Needs a Code page 437 font. I think that's just the character set, not the font. I don't know if the font I'm thinking of even has a name, but it was whatever was built into the VGA BIOSes of the time. It has a distinctive look.

https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/

(it does seem to use one of these for me, seemingly via "font-family: DOS")

Makes me want to dial into something and play Trade Wars.

I thought I was being original when I redid my website[0] in a similar style this past summer (right down to the text appearing to come in at 9600 baud). But it appears this repo is at least 2 years old..

[0] http://saul.pw

Gah ... I automatically started looking for doors when I went to your site! :D

Instant love :)

I wish somebody extended it, covering more classic themes: Turbo Pascal 5 (the blue theme like this), Turbo Pascal 3 (the black / gray / yellow theme), SuperCalc, Word for DOS, etc.

A special challenge would be fitting a theme into the 4-color CGA modes (red/green and purple/blue), complete with low-res proportional fonts and pixelation grids over pictures.

And in case people haven't seen it - here's a few things that TP3 is smaller than:

http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

perfect

better than this http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/

Better is subjective. I think that's wonderful.

That's superb as well, but a completely different time period. More than a decade of GUI and web development happened between those two.

This seems like a way to modernize a curses-based application without the users of the application noticing much of a difference.

I can see a use case for this -> For software users who are so used to the DOS / Terminal interfaces in some old COBOL, Foxpro, dBase, Clipper, Turbo Pascal and other programming languages back then. You can switch between the shiny newer interface to using the old DOS gui-based look.

Nice work!

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7983008

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959068

Hey! An Amdek color monitor! I worked for Amdek in 1983. We sold a LOT of those color monitors.

The fake ad is just a photoshopped version of a real ad. I may have scanned it myself. I don't remember.

It's funny -- I spent many, many years looking at interfaces like that, designing them, developing them. I thought I'd feel some nostalgia.

But no, I'm glad those days are long gone. I never want to see any of my old dBASE, Clipper, Pascal code again...

It is really well done, I want to use it for something but I have no idea what.

Wow, this beautiful!

Maybe it's just the nostalgia talking, but I really like this look.

I love this so much. All it needs to be perfect is a bunch of keyboard shortcuts built-in---I really want to be able to use arrow keys to navigate like I'm really in DOS. :-)

that's been a big request in the last wave of popularity (as in 36 hours) ... I'll think about how to do it in a non-awful way.

The blue/yellow/gray was so easy on the eyes.

yes, the fact that I also run http://unreadable.website along with having written this is not-so-much-a-coincidence.

note: A number of the authors seemed to have found out they were listed on that site and increased their contrast. Mission accomplished.

Hi, author here. I missed this. Sorry I'm in late. Questions, critiques, and everything else accepted. Thanks

My favorite part is the progressive screen display and the random flashing cursor.

Progress bars look horrible.

They do, I wonder however if this is not where the CSS hits its limits.

3.x is better ... I haven't updated the demo page ... this thing becomes randomly popular every couple of years or so ... I should probably make that demo better.

That is pretty funny. Excellent work.

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