Amber Monitor

PmWiki Skin for Coredump.us (site down) by Eclectic Tech.

What type of skin or template do you create for a geek/tech info site?

The site these templates were used on has been taken down following a server crash. I don't know whether the site admin will be putting them up. Please view the screenshots of the wiki template.

What is the significance of this template?

Geeks -- can you say ''Nostalgia"? Remember the amber monitor?

If you never used earlier computer systems (say in the 80s), you may not have gotten to see the amber monitor. You can look for "amber monitor" in Google (not a very interesting search -- and under "Images" in Google, you get under 10 images, none of which show the screen), but you can't find it mentioned as it's own topic in Wikipedia (amazing eh?).

The --um dubious delight-- in the challenge of making a browser emulate an amber monitor is that the amber monitor was very limited in display capabilities. Program developers had to be very creative to come up with program interfaces in two colors -- black or amber -- with only one font (mono-spaced) and a number of special characters. Reverse video (black text on amber background) was often used to highlight text or for menu bars, and the sites used command- and arrow-key navigation (this predates the mouse being in widespread use -- these programs and operating systems probably couldn't recognize a mouse), etc. I emulated the look and feel of an amber monitor based word processor in the wiki interface.

Why are there no other sites emulating the amber monitor look?

I think it's pretty self-explanatory if you look at the site with the skin on. Eyestrain city. Monotonous. Boring. Clinical. Even ugly. One of the places you still see this type of monitor is a server room. The other is a hospital. Why did I do it then? What kind of sado-masochist am I?

State dependent memory. If you spent myriad geeky hours in front of that monitor 20 years ago, BOY does that site take you back -- with a twisting wrenching feeling. It's evocative to a long-time diehard geek. It speaks to the geek soul.

Why sado-masochist? Probably no one else in the world will stare at that skin as much as I did in creating it. It does not take long for it to make my longtime-diehard-geek mind reel and my eyes ache.

Under Construction

While the template is about 95% finished, there are still things to be done -- like better graphics for the edit screen "submit" and "reset" buttons (Firefox's look OK but Safari's "Cocoa" buttons don't fit AT ALL), removing the gui text editing buttons on the edit screen, changing the "empty page" indicators, and creating new PmWiki markup for links in headers (which requires time delving through wiki code). But overall, I am very happy with the site.

Screenshot gallery

(click for full screenshot)