23.03.06 GLTerminal, a blast from the past.
Amongst the thousands blogs that one can bump into while surfing the net, sometimes it happens that one attracts a vast public attention, that later is then able to define a specific trend. This is, for example, the case of ldopa.net that talks about the sudden trend of GLTerminal, or rather the attempt to retrieve the typical old CRT monitor visual aesthetic (as we can define the terminal screens from the seventies). GLTerminal is a software emulator that brings on the current Mac OS X systems the mood of a work session made with an ancestor of the computer we actually use. After installing GLTerminal we have a software terminal with the usual green (or amber) text on a black background, the typical screen curvature, and the delay from typing a char to seeing it flickering on the screen. What'd be the reason of this popular trend? Probably the wish to identify oneself for a moment with some hacker icons as Richard Stallman, for instance, that just started to code at the Harvard University on this type of terminals. But this trend is very different from the fetishism of the old hardware collectors, because the code is emulated and then it's running on a modern and super-fast Mac. Nothing to do also with the efforts made for recovering the functionality of old computers, as it is pursued by distributed computing projects. It's only a short nostalgic blast from the past.
Vito Campanelli