sites/randogoth.com/content/dostalgia.md
randogoth 8505b7e9e0 Three sites, one directory each
flux.vision, tobias.raayoni-last.com and randogoth.com. They were one site until
October 2026, serving four audiences from a single dated list, which is the only
format that can hold unrelated things at once.

flux.vision is recovered from the Wayback Machine, where it had sat since being
deleted in 2021: 90 articles, closed and maintained rather than updated.
tobias.raayoni-last.com is the professional record, 97 articles back to 1999.
randogoth.com is the technical work, 41 articles across six areas, served as an
ANSI bulletin board.

History starts here deliberately. The development history, the 266-row inventory
that records why each article went where it did, the Wayback pipelines, the
pruned articles, the source archives and the full-size images are kept beside
the repo rather than in it, so a clone is the web presence and not the argument
that produced it. REFACTOR.md is gitignored for the same reason. See README.md
for where that material lives, and keep it: the sort is not reproducible from
these three directories alone.

Each site documents itself in its own README, including the traps that cost time
and look like nothing when you get them wrong.
2026-10-05 20:54:45 +03:00

1.9 KiB

Title: Website Relaunch Date: 2023-04-27 Category: MINIMAL Summary: The inevitable DOStalgia of a Xennial nerd

The post-Covid era required a new website as I have not only retired my VJ career but also undergone a phase of personal growth and reorientation I wanted to see reflected on my digital front door.

After many ideas and sketches revolving around complex moiré patterned parallax effects and a very visual approach I settled with the complete opposite: minimalist and text driven.

To pay an hommage to my earliest days of creativity with digital technology I went with a design that reflects the "UX" of a personal computer running a DOS operating system. Just like the one I was tinkering with in my mid 1990s teenage years on my dad's discarded 80286 machine on which I had taught myself typewriting, programming in QBASIC, and using word processing software in all kinds of artistic manners.

What I actually wanted

A bulletin board. I tried setting up a few of the real ones first and gave up somewhere in their configuration, which has not become friendlier in thirty years, so I took the DOS application instead: Turbo Vision chrome, a menu bar, a clock in the corner. The right machine running the wrong program.

It is a board now. Eighty columns of CP437 on black, the sixteen colour EGA palette, message areas you pick by number and a prompt at the bottom that takes them. Articles are messages and carry the header a Fidonet reader would have shown. A missing page says NO CARRIER, because there is no other correct answer.

The masthead is set in Syndicate, a TheDraw font from the period, found by reading 3711 of them and keeping the ones that fit RANDOGOTH into 80 columns. It draws a different palette each time you arrive. That is the only decoration here that is also the subject.

None of it needed a BBS package in the end. It is a static site generator and about two hundred lines of CSS.