
Vintage 1980s DOS inspired Twitter Bootstrap theme - akshayagarwal
https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386
======
vog
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#...](https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/components.html#typography)

~~~
lloeki
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?

~~~
vog
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.

------
nsxwolf
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.

~~~
pjc50
[https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/](https://int10h.org/oldschool-
pc-fonts/readme/)

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

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

------
rabidrat
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](http://saul.pw)

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

------
nine_k
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.

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

[http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html)

------
jlebrech
perfect

better than this [http://code.divshot.com/geo-
bootstrap/](http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/)

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

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

------
AngeloAnolin
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!

------
slipstream-
Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7983008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7983008)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959068)

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

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

------
ccleve
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...

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

------
krylon
Wow, this beautiful!

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

------
paultopia
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. :-)

~~~
kristopolous
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.

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

~~~
kristopolous
yes, the fact that I also run
[http://unreadable.website](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.

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

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

------
skocznymroczny
Progress bars look horrible.

~~~
kristopolous
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.

------
gadders
That is pretty funny. Excellent work.

