MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC IV · THE WEB · 1990–95 · page 28 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS
28 · Navigator · 28.8
A spinning logo, a progress bar, a company that went public 16 months after it started. 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 1994 · Mosaic Communications Corporation was founded on April 4, 1994, by Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen, and renamed Netscape later that year. (Netscape history)
- LIT 1994 · Netscape Navigator's first beta came out on October 13, 1994, and version 1.0 on December 15, 1994. (Netscape history)
- LIT 1995 · Netscape went public on August 9, 1995. (Netscape history)
- LIT 1994 · Over a serial link each byte costs 10 bits (8 data bits plus start and stop bits), so a 28.8 kbit/s modem moves about 2.9 KB a second. (8N1 framing)
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 Race a download across 300 baud to 28.8k. The page works out every time from bits and baud, then checks the race agrees.
Original pixel cast on this page MODEL
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): 57f20213c43daef7987391a234b55bd2edadb968d9d029021988a5baac05cf6a · written to seals/hacf-28-netscape.dlw only if missing