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Comment by keslag | Hacker News Reader

I used an amber CRT for 17 years. What this is missing is the mottled browning and yellowing from all the cigarette smoke on the beige plastic case. Now what you really need to be retro is a TTY printer. I used to get my work orders through one. No screen, just a seemingly infinite roll of dot matrix paper and a keyboard.

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Has anyone tried a "open plan office" term yet?

So work at home people, and people in sane environments, can experience the huge performance boost of an open plan office.

So just vanilla unicode-rvxt or whatever you use, with some really special additions...

1) ghostly reflections of people constantly walking behind you and sometimes glancing at your screen as they walk by in the background as a transparency layer.

2) If you're a glossy screen in a brightly lit office you get torturous reflections causing eyestrain, make sure to include that. If you can't see what you're doing, you should just work harder.

3) A continuous mix of noise plays in the background at random levels, probably stolen from youtube type videos. So dramatic arguments, sports gossip, people asking each other questions to google for them, ringtones and other noisy beepy stuff, all mixed together continuously. If you're distracted, its your fault for being distracted.

Might have to script the background activities although an option to just mash up purely random youtube traffic would be funny. To get people to use it, you could create kind of a directed, scripted story that plays out. This lowers the technological bar to merely being a video player with high transparency and a probably very large video file.

I have no idea if this is a genius idea or mere parody. Probably a work of performance art if done well.

I am aware there are lots of sites that play background audio such as a coffee house or whatever. I'm looking for the open plan office experience, specifically.

As someone who both comes from an environment with epic levels of sarcasm and works remote, I appreciated this comment.

Haha, that's pretty great. As someone who works from home, I think this would make me 1,000x more efficient. Actually, having worked as a reporter in an open plan office ... never mind :)

In a way, LCD monitors allowed creation of the open-plan office. With CRTs, desks had to be deep enough for the tubes (often 18", sometimes a lot more). The stand for the LCD is usually the thickest part of one, and they're thin enough to allow for people to work on opposite sides of a trestle table.

If done right, this could actually be a pretty brilliant indie game. The first level of the game is you just doing some sort of office-work-related puzzle. The second level of the game, which takes awhile to notice, is the plot unfolding in the background, as you overhear phone calls and conversations related to the emails coming into your inbox.

Think "Gone Home", but in an office.

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