Unless you were largely cognisant during the late 90s, it's very hard to get across to you just _how_ bristling with positive energy computing was back then, just **look** at this opening screen, it screams "ARE YOU READY TO LEARN MOTHERF*CKER?!".

It has dolphins, in the clouds. How many smartphone apps welcome you with dolphins in clouds?

#encarta #90s #retrocomputing

#vaporwave looked at the busts of Mozart and the dolphins in the clouds and thought that it meant “this is trippy” and not “universal shared hope”. This is a metaphor for how modern computing is all about looks with no actual meaning or message.

@Kroc As we later learned, most people hated that and wanted to be angry at strangers and buy things instead.

@Kroc "Nelson Mandela is not dead yet, goddamnit!"

@Kroc I think I had Encarta 98, about a year before we got dial-up internet.

@Kroc As a kid the Utopian Scholastic aesthetic was so present everywhere and it really felt like we'd sort of come to the end of history and were looking back at it like we were in a museum.

I'm sure a lot of that was just childhood innocence but also I think there was just a lot more optimism for the future back then.

@dfstarshine I believe, in practice, that the style simply comes from digital-typesetting. It finally became possible to print books with full colour digital images anywhere in the page. That had been either prohibitively expensive or impossible in the past, and I think it lead directly to Utopian Scholastic’s design elements of disparate items combined together on the page. Education books no longer had to be boring and digital photo manipulation allowed designers to play with layout in a way they hadn’t been able to before with manual / photo-typesetting

@Kroc Probably. It's significant though how much of an effect the aesthetics of these things has on the psyche of a generation.

@dfstarshine It’s understated just how big of a shift in such a short amount of time digital publishing was. People who had been working in print publishing for decades were used to linotypes and “paste ups” where, if they wanted text to flow around an image, they physically cut out lines of text and positioned them by hand.

To go from that to having a Mac, Aldus PageMaker, a CD of stock photography and a copy of Photoshop utterly changed the rules on what was possible and how much the designer could play with it. There was reason to be optimistic there.

@Kroc @dfstarshine
And yet, my earliest website designs were wild and very creative, having no standard out there, we created sites that were more unique then. Now, though there are tools are infinitely better, websites are dull, filled with ads, poorly edited because of infinite scrolling, have little that isn’t some version of something you’ve already seen a million times. It’s boilerplate banality now. It occupies people’s time instead of engaging it.

@Kroc
ah yes, the bygone era of when it seemed like computers were a good idea..