MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC IV · THE WEB · 1990–95 · page 27 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS

27 · Mosaic · Pictures in the Page

Pictures sit inside the text for the first time, and the web gets popular fast. MODEL

LIT Dave (t269): "perfect, can you build your next 32 pages in mayhem, think halt and catch fire in code monkeys grafx"

LIT Three.js r160 (local copy), DPR capped at 2. MODEL Original voxel art in a Code-Monkeys-style pixel look: the scene is drawn into a low-resolution target, then one shader pass adds CRT curvature, scanlines, phosphor glow (P7 blue) and snaps colours to the websafe palette. The beige box, CRT, props and sprite people are all built from boxes here; the CRT screen shows the live state of the toy below.

Play / poke

The history

  • LIT 1993 · NCSA Mosaic's first public release (0.5) was announced by Marc Andreessen on January 23, 1993; version 1.0 followed on April 21, 1993. (NCSA Mosaic history)
  • LIT 1993 · Mosaic 0.10 (March 1993) added the <img> tag for inline images. (NCSA Mosaic history)
  • LIT 1993 · Andreessen and Eric Bina built it at NCSA, University of Illinois; ports to Windows and the Mac came in September 1993. (NCSA Mosaic history)

Checked live on this page:

  • checking…

The show & the cast

MODEL Season four (1990–94): the web arrives. A hand-built directory and a crawler-based search engine compete (the show calls them Comet and Rover), until the story closes around 1994.

MODEL Type a little HTML on the left and the toy renderer draws it pixel-style, with inline pixel images. The page checks its parser against a known tree.

Original pixel cast on this page MODEL

ROXY ROM · the punk coder
KID CRAWLER · the teenage web builder

Made-up characters who stand in for roles. They are not the show's characters, and no show art, logos, likenesses or dialogue are used. The show and character names appear only as text references.

Improvement loop · ARTIST+CRITIC

MODEL ARTIST changes the look (pixel block size, scanlines, palette snap, CRT curve, exposure, phosphor glow) and CRITIC renders a 128×96 test frame, reads its pixels and scores five things: palette fidelity, contrast, scanlines, exposure and pixel blockiness (weights come from this page's seal). A change is kept only if the score goes up. LIT Scores are measured from pixels, never guessed, and the page throws if the best score ever goes down or doesn't reproduce.

params:

    Gallery

    Exports

    WALL Nothing here goes online: the modems, boards, networks and markets are simulations. No real BIOS or ROM code is included. Show footage and art are not reproduced by design. AMBER facts are sourced but approximate.

    proving…

    Seal sha256(name|slug|blurb): 39e51cd714d289b599a8cb68a872a7a5d799d105e6ead9392f7aae8400228a2f · written to seals/hacf-27-mosaic.dlw only if missing