from Hacker News

Vintage 1980s DOS inspired Twitter Bootstrap theme

by akshayagarwal on 1/8/18, 10:46 AM with 34 comments

  • by vog on 1/8/18, 5:21 PM

    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#...

  • by nsxwolf on 1/8/18, 3:48 PM

    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.

  • by Harimwakairi on 1/8/18, 4:23 PM

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

  • by rabidrat on 1/8/18, 7:37 PM

    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

  • by nine_k on 1/8/18, 4:49 PM

    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.

  • by jlebrech on 1/8/18, 3:49 PM

  • by jscipione on 1/8/18, 5:44 PM

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

  • by AngeloAnolin on 1/8/18, 5:45 PM

    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!

  • by slipstream- on 1/8/18, 6:08 PM

  • by creeble on 1/8/18, 6:20 PM

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

  • by ccleve on 1/8/18, 5:05 PM

    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...

  • by wafflesraccoon on 1/8/18, 4:29 PM

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

  • by krylon on 1/8/18, 6:07 PM

    Wow, this beautiful!

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

  • by paultopia on 1/8/18, 5:21 PM

    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. :-)

  • by Clubber on 1/8/18, 4:16 PM

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

  • by kristopolous on 1/9/18, 3:44 PM

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

  • by jroseattle on 1/8/18, 4:40 PM

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

  • by skocznymroczny on 1/8/18, 4:37 PM

    Progress bars look horrible.

  • by gadders on 1/8/18, 3:17 PM

    That is pretty funny. Excellent work.