MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC IV · THE WEB · 1990–95 · page 29 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS
29 · Directory vs Crawler
A hand-sorted list of websites against a robot that reads them all. 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 · Jerry Yang and David Filo started "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" at Stanford in January 1994; it was renamed Yahoo! a few months later. (Yahoo history)
- LIT 1994 · WebCrawler, by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, launched in April 1994 as the first engine to search the full text of pages. (WebCrawler history)
- LIT 1994 · Lycos went online at Carnegie Mellon in July 1994. (Lycos history)
- MODEL 1994 · In the show's last season, a directory (Comet) and a search engine (Rover) compete. (Halt and Catch Fire S4 (reference))
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 WEAVER files sites by hand into a directory, BUILDER crawls, CRITIC asks both the same questions and scores who finds more. The pixel web is made up.
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 · BUILDER+WEAVER+CRITIC
MODEL BUILDER and WEAVER take turns changing 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): 51ced420efb8e01707933bb19391ad2c715d8ee972dbcecba7bc12698d09fcad · written to seals/hacf-29-directory-vs-crawler.dlw only if missing