
Cool-retro-term - thristian
https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
======
DanielKehoe
This is awesome nostalgia, but tell me, for those who have never seen a CRT
display, does it have any meaning to you?

Seeing this, I wonder if the world has forgotten what a computer is. Now we've
got devices, for example phones, and the computer (and the Internet) is right
at the surface of the device. When we used CRT displays, we knew our display
was just a repurposed television screen that communicated with a separate and
discreet computer, which was another (and different) kind of machine.

Same with modems. When they screeched and howled, the duration of noise and
the "seeking" nature of the sounds was a clear indicator that we were
connecting to other devices at a distance, devices that were not always
available, over connections that were tenuous.

Now everything is immediate and ubiquitous. The computer has been subsumed
into the terminal itself. And what was distant is at our fingertips.

~~~
to3m
I suspect only people who've never used a CRT would use this sort of thing ;)

I used CRTs for years (naturally... I'm in my late 30s) and, without fail,
they sucked. If they weren't long-persistence, they were flickery; if they
were, they were smeary, even by the standards of ancient mono laptops. If they
were flat-screened, focus was inconsistent. Large ones were expensive (and by
"large" I mean "19 inch"), and you lost some screen area from the bezel.

If you found one that didn't have any of these problems, it was probably
enormously expensive. But even your enormously expensive one wouldn't look
_quite_ pin-sharp at 1600x1200. (Unless it was truly enormously expensive, and
was a 22+ inches diagonal.)

And whatever you did, they took up a huge amount of space, used a vast amount
of electricity, and emitted a lot of radiation (though nobody ever seemed to
be quite clear on whether this was actually bad for you).

And what nobody seems to remember is how rather unreliable they are. Failure
rate for the LCDs I've owned: 0%. For the CRTs? 100%. None made it past six
years.

If you like them for games, great. Enjoy your youthful ability to detect those
extra 10ms of latency while you still have it, that's what I say! But for a
terminal? You're nuts.

~~~
chadillac
I bought a "decommissioned" Sony Trinitron monitor for $200 from a company I
worked at at the time. It was 27" flat screen, and glorious, was amazing for
gaming and counter-strike.

Now, carrying it up 3 flights of stairs on the other hand almost made the
cheap price not worth it. That thing must have weighed 50lbs.

~~~
to3m
27"! I never saw a monitor that large. I think 22" was the largest. Even TVs
didn't go all that much larger than 27", particularly 4:3 ones.

And a Trinitron too! That must have been spitefully expensive to buy...

~~~
disposablename
Sony definitely made a 24" Trinitron monitor:
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00004YNSR/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00004YNSR/)

and a 34" widescreen TV:
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0002NDFKM/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0002NDFKM/)

~~~
to3m
CRTs that large were pretty rare, though. Monitors tended to stop at 21" (by
which point they were a good foot deep, if not more...), and I'm less certain
about TVs, but I'd be surprised if even 34" ones were all that common. If
nothing else, they're an absolute bugger to move. My parents' 31" widescreen
CRT was an absolute monster... my back still twinges just thinking about it.

------
keslag
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.

~~~
VLM
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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
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.

------
krat0sprakhar
For the ones looking to take this further, there's Cathode[0] (Mac only) -
[http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/](http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/)

~~~
copperx
Cathode is closed source. How can we 'take it further'?

~~~
krat0sprakhar
Apologies if my wording gave you a wrong idea. What I meant was that Cathode
has a good variety of themes and customization features.

~~~
masklinn
And the sounds are pretty great. The "Heavy" power-on sound is… satisfying:
[https://soundcloud.com/biohazard-music/cathode-heavy-
poweron...](https://soundcloud.com/biohazard-music/cathode-heavy-poweron-
sound)

------
agumonkey
Skeumorphism is trendy again. If it wasn't for watts, I'd get a big CRT back,
analog pixels sounds better[1]. Or maybe a Grid Compass
[http://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/54135-grid-
compass-1...](http://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/54135-grid-
compass-1101-and-1139) ;)

[1] (c) Monster

------
boobsbr
Now, just set it up to use the VT 220 font, and we're done.

[http://christfollower.me/misc/glasstty/index.html](http://christfollower.me/misc/glasstty/index.html)

------
habosa
Small details: it seems from the screenshots that the screen 'glows' so that
the bezel of the display has a tint of the most prominent color on screen.
That's a great touch that makes it look more real than a terminal within a
static frame.

------
sctb
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8399461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8399461)

------
thristian
It's surprising to me how much narrower 40 columns is now than it was when I
had a real Apple II.

------
jmckib
This looks awesome, I just wish it could go full screen on my mac. You can
download the OSX dmg here, I almost missed it since it's at the very bottom of
the instructions: [https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
term/releases](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/releases)

~~~
dullcrisp
What's weird on Mac is that it seems to use Command as the Control key.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Looks like a known issue: [https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
term/issues/203](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/issues/203)

The Command key seems to act like the control key.

------
diltonm
I gotta say this is a pretty cool app. A lot of the UI seems to be
declarative. Very nice, considering donating.

------
moomin
How about actually supporting coloured text, and get new school eye candy with
your old school eye candy? :)

~~~
delcypher
It does. You need to go into the terminal settings enable "Chroma Color" and
then tweak the value.

~~~
moomin
Sorry, I meant like xterm256 &c

------
youonlyliveonce
This was in the frontpage just a few months ago. Edit: On a sidenote, upvote
for Skeumorphism !

~~~
normloman
I'm getting sick of flat design. But let's not go back to skeumorphism. A few
years ago, when fake wood textures were all the rage, I remember being so
frustrated at some of the interfaces. Lots of awkward metaphors (Oh, I'm
supposed to click the inkwell to write a new document?) and poor
discoverability (That's a button? I thought it was part of the background!).

------
sauere
The amount of reposts in the last few months is getting stupid.

------
normloman
Not sure what this is supposed to be. It's obviously not meant to be
functional. It doesn't look good (rather, it looks purposely bad). And no
matter how close to the real thing you make it, it's not going to fool me into
feeling like I'm on a CRT when I'm not. So I'm not feeling nostalgic for it
either.

The best nostalgic experience I got this year was booting my raspberry pi for
the first time, because you can have it boot straight to command line. It
brought me back to my first DOS pc, when you had to type "WIN" to run Windows.

~~~
sergiotapia
Oh god I hate these type of comments.

Please if you have nothing constructive to say, don't be rude and dismiss
somebodies hard work. It's infinitely easier to put someone down than it is to
actually produce something.

~~~
normloman
Who is that thin skinned? If you work hard on something, people inevitably
shit on it. It's human nature. And someone as talented as this creator is
probably used to it by now.

Besides, limiting conversation to just constructive criticism limits the scope
of HN. This isn't a support group. It's a discussion forum. We should be free
to criticize not only the implementation of a program, but the need to build
it in the first place.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _If you work hard on something, people inevitably shit on it. It 's human
> nature. And someone as talented as this creator is probably used to it by
> now._

This compliment is delivered like an engagement ring in a dog turd.

