Datagubbe

The Decline of Usability

If you find this text interesting, please consider also reading The Decline of Usability: Revisited or some of my other many ramblings on modern user interfaces.

User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

Ahh, the demo scene - a digital art subculture, a motley gang of creative nerds, and a favourite pastime of mine. So much amazing art, music and code has been produced by sceners, and anyone who comes into contact with the scene might start to wonder exactly how - apart from hours of dedicated grind, of course.

No Config for Old Men

Ask anyone who's really into cooking and they'll tell you how important it is to have a kitchen that's arranged just right. To someone who rarely cooks, a kitchen is probably just a place to store a few pots and a toaster, and the placement of such stuff doesn't matter much: canned soup and microwave dinners are…

The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

The demo scene has a peculiar view on copyright . It roughly boils down to a system of effort - effort in ideas, effort in craft - where the scene polices itself and punishes sceners that steal outright from other sceners. Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to…

The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)

A follow-up to this text is available here . It goes into much greater detail about signal quality, and also examines how pixel art techniques have been used on non-CRT systems.

Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

A great amount of my writing on this site revolves around complaining about modern user interface design . Some people agree with me, some don't. Most probably don't care at all. That's fine. What I find interesting is that many (but not all!) people who disagree either present extremely specific non-argument nitpicks…

The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

The demo scene was recently proclaimed a UNESCO Living Cultural Heritage in Sweden, following several other European nations. As a scener, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. It's amusing on some level, there's maybe even a bit of pride involved, but also fear that it might bring unwanted attention to a Good…

The colorful charm of Amiga utility disks

Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two). For the demo scene , this was the only Amiga configuration that mattered during…

The Decline of Usability: Revisited

Three years ago, I wrote a rant about the problems of our current UI paradigm. The complaints I voiced were hardly new or unique, neither was the text what I'd consider my best writing. It was, honestly, mostly a way to blow off steam. It seems I struck a nerve, though, because it's proven to be one of the most…

Little Things That Made Amiga Great

To most people, the Amiga is probably synonymous with the Amiga 500 and that machine was, above all, a video game: something into which you plonked 3.5" floppy disks that transported you to strange, wonderful worlds and hours of fun. To this group, the gamers, the operating system wasn't important. They probably…

Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

Or: Jonathan Blow is wrong but also right and we still need to prevent the collapse of civilization

Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a computer system called the oN-Line System, or NLS. The NLS is the source of a lot of computer firsts. Among other things, Engelbart showed video conferencing, collaborative text editing, embedded graphics, copying and pasting, and hypertext - all of it accessible through a…

An Ode to Deluxe Paint (2023)

When first seeing an Amiga 500 computer, it wasn't the games but a copy of the painting program Deluxe Paint II that really got me hooked. Since then, computers and visual art have forever been linked in my mind. Apart from dreaming of an Amiga of my own, my boyhood interest in technical marvels was never about…

Using an Amiga in 2021: Making an intro

Every once in a while, someone asks about my interests. I usually just say I'm into home computers from the 1980s and, since most people are very nice and polite, they then ask what I do with them. I usually say something about competing in computer graphics at "digital art festivals," because explaining what the…

How Doom didn't kill the Amiga

A scene from the Amiga game Defender of the Crown, released in 1986. For years, no other home computer came close to screens like these.

The Home Computer Generation

A seemingly frightening realization regularly dawns on various pundits these days: Being a digital native doesn't automatically mean you're computer savvy. Due to a gradual transformation from general purpose tools to digital appliances, computers are now more than ever perceived as magical boxes by their users. Many…

Amiga Screens: A Primer

One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens . Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga…

Stranger Things and the Amiga 1000

About a year ago, I cancelled my Netflix subscription. One of the few shows listed on the "plus" side when I made my decision was Stranger Things: an entertaining series with an excellent first and good second season. In short, I'm a fan of the show - though my appreciation of it doesn't come near my fanatical passion…

Not as famous as they should be (2021)

Some people in computing are famous, some are not. Sometimes the fame is proportional to their contributions to computing, sometimes it's not. That's how life and the world works: the winners write the history. Financial success and personal charisma are often deemed more interesting than quietly doing your work…

Computers Built to Last

I've recently thought a lot about the essay The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum. It's a delightful piece about the author's ideal, long-lasting computational platform - precisely the thing I enjoy reading. It's got a nice blend of slow tech and libre computing advocacy mixed with personal ponderings centered…

Is Winter Coming? (2024)

In the 1960s, AI researchers tried - and failed - to deliver machine translation of Russian to English. Overly confident researchers, lazy journalists and far too optimistic tech utopianists all built expectations that couldn't be met. Eventually, the lack of results put a stop to the previously generous funding. The…

When Computers Were Cool

Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS

In keeping with the Commodore tradition of cost cutting, most consumer models of their Amiga line of computers came with severely watered down documentation. The Amiga 500 was an exception from this rule, but owners of later machines - such as the A1200 - may not have gotten any documentation for the command line part…

The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)

Roughly a year ago, I wrote a text about the effects of CRT screens on pixel art . It surprised me by becoming one of the most controversial pieces I've published here. In it, I propose the following: