MODEL MAYHEM · under KEEPER ERIS · Mayhem home
Halt and Catch Fire · in pixels
Thirty-two pages on the Halt and Catch Fire era, from the 1981 BIOS listing to the 1995 web, drawn as original Code-Monkeys-style pixel art in 3D. Real computing history tagged LIT; the show and the pixel cast are 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. Card previews are live 3D thumbnails that load only while on screen (and unload when scrolled away) to stay under the browser's WebGL limit.
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- 01 · The BIOS Listing
MODEL ARC I · 1981 · post · ARTIST+CRITIC
A beige box powers on in pixel light. The BIOS listing that IBM printed for everyone is where the clone story starts. - 02 · 55 AA · The ROM Checksum
MODEL ARC I · 1981 · hexdump · ARTIST+CRITIC
A hex dump scrolls on a green CRT. A PC ROM must start with 55 AA, and all of its bytes must add up to zero. - 03 · The Clean Room
MODEL ARC I · 1982 · cleanroom · BUILDER+WEAVER+CRITIC
Two rooms and one glass wall. One team reads the BIOS and writes specs; the other team never sees the code and builds from the specs alone. - 04 · The First Clones
MODEL ARC I · 1983 · cleanroom · ARTIST+CRITIC
Clones line up on a showroom carpet. The test is simple: does the software run? - 05 · Luggables
MODEL ARC I · 1983 · specs · ARTIST+CRITIC
A sewing-machine-sized case opens on the desk: keyboard in the lid, a 9-inch green screen inside. - 06 · COMDEX Floor
MODEL ARC I · 1983 · breakout · ARTIST+CRITIC
Pixel crowds, folding tables, a demo machine that must not crash on the show floor. - 07 · 1984 · The Mac
MODEL ARC I · 1984 · specs · ARTIST+CRITIC
A small beige all-in-one with a smile on its screen changes what everyone thinks a computer should feel like. - 08 · HCF · Halt and Catch Fire
MODEL ARC I · 1977 · hcf · ARTIST+CRITIC
The opcode the show is named after: run it and the CPU stops listening, while the address bus becomes a counter. - 09 · The Mutiny House
MODEL ARC II · 1985 · chat · ARTIST+CRITIC
A rented house full of desks, cables down the stairs and a chat room that never sleeps. - 10 · CBBS · Chicago 1978
MODEL ARC II · 1978 · bbs · ARTIST+CRITIC
One phone line, one modem, one caller at a time: the bulletin board starts in a Chicago snowstorm. - 11 · The Handshake
MODEL ARC II · 1981 · modem · ARTIST+CRITIC
Dial tones, an answer tone, then two whistles that become a conversation at 300 bits a second. - 12 · Fidonet · Store and Forward
MODEL ARC II · 1984 · fidonet · BUILDER+WEAVER+CRITIC
Boards call each other at night, when the phone rates drop, and pass the mail along. - 13 · ANSI Art
MODEL ARC II · 1990 · ansi · ARTIST+CRITIC
Block characters and 16 colours: the art scene that painted every BBS login screen. - 14 · MUDs and Kesmai
MODEL ARC II · 1985 · mud · ARTIST+CRITIC
Text rooms, shared adventures, a dragon priced by the hour. - 15 · Q-Link Tanks
MODEL ARC II · 1985 · tanks · ARTIST+CRITIC
A two-player arena on a dial-up service: you against an agent, one tank each. - 16 · Packet-Switched Nights
MODEL ARC II · 1986 · dialup · BUILDER+WEAVER+CRITIC
Rented mainframe time, packet networks and a bank of modems that are always busy at 9 pm. - 17 · Westbound · NSFNET
MODEL ARC III · 1986 · specs · ARTIST+CRITIC
Moving trucks on a pixel highway, and a research network that is about to get much faster. - 18 · Brain · The Boot Sector
MODEL ARC III · 1986 · worm · ARTIST+CRITIC
A virus that rides on floppy disks, one boot sector at a time. - 19 · The Morris Worm
MODEL ARC III · 1988 · worm · ARTIST+CRITIC
November 2, 1988: a worm crawls the research internet and does not know when to stop. - 20 · Black Monday
MODEL ARC III · 1987 · ticker · ARTIST+CRITIC
A green ticker turns red: the day the market fell more than a fifth. - 21 · The IPO Bell
MODEL ARC III · 1986 · ticker · BUILDER+WEAVER+CRITIC
Ring the bell, price the shares, hope the first day goes up. - 22 · HyperCard Stacks
MODEL ARC III · 1987 · hyper · ARTIST+CRITIC
Cards, buttons, links: a toolkit that let anyone build linked screens years before the web. - 23 · The Swap Meet
MODEL ARC III · 1995 · auction · ARTIST+CRITIC
A pixel bazaar: strangers trade online, before anyone was sure that could work. - 24 · Information Management: A Proposal
MODEL ARC III · 1989 · hyper · BUILDER+WEAVER+CRITIC
A memo at CERN with a sketch of boxes and arrows, marked "vague but exciting". - 25 · Gopher Holes
MODEL ARC IV · 1991 · gopher · ARTIST+CRITIC
Menus inside menus: the University of Minnesota's tidy way to tunnel through the internet. - 26 · Archie · Search Before the Web
MODEL ARC IV · 1990 · search · BUILDER+WEAVER+CRITIC
A script that collects FTP file lists so you can search them: the first internet search engine. - 27 · Mosaic · Pictures in the Page
MODEL ARC IV · 1993 · html · ARTIST+CRITIC
Pictures sit inside the text for the first time, and the web gets popular fast. - 28 · Navigator · 28.8
MODEL ARC IV · 1994 · download · ARTIST+CRITIC
A spinning logo, a progress bar, a company that went public 16 months after it started. - 29 · Directory vs Crawler
MODEL ARC IV · 1994 · search · BUILDER+WEAVER+CRITIC
A hand-sorted list of websites against a robot that reads them all. - 30 · Eternal September
MODEL ARC IV · 1993 · usenet · ARTIST+CRITIC
Every September new students flooded Usenet. In 1993 the flood never stopped. - 31 · NSFNET Sunset
MODEL ARC IV · 1995 · dialup · BUILDER+WEAVER+CRITIC
The research backbone switches off and commercial dial-up takes over, with busy signals for everyone. - 32 · The Next Thing
MODEL ARC IV · 1995 · breakout · ARTIST+CRITIC
The whole cast in one pixel room in 1995. The machine boots, the screen glows, there is always a next thing. - 33 · Spotlight · following Cameron, 1983 → 1995
MODEL SPOTLIGHT · 1983–1995 · follow-cam · FOLLOWER+CRITIC
One page that centres on Cameron Howe and follows her through time on axes of gray, white and black: white is time, gray is what she builds, black is what it costs her (MODEL).
Spotlight (t270)
LIT Dave (t270): "perfect , take this and center on camaron but have it move and follow her from say 1983 ish, have it be axes of gray/white/black"
MODEL Following Cameron, 1983 → 1995: a follow camera rides her path through seven eras on axes of gray, white and black (white = x = time, gray = y = what she builds, black = z = what it costs her). The whole scene is in grayscale.
How these pages work
MODEL Four arcs follow the show's four seasons: I The Clone (BIOS, clean rooms, luggables, 1981–84), II Mutiny (boards, modems, online games, 1978–90), III The Valley (viruses, IPOs, hypertext, 1986–95) and IV The Web (Gopher, Archie, Mosaic, Netscape, directories vs crawlers, 1990–95). Each page has a 3D pixel scene, a toy to play or poke (a BIOS POST screen, a hex-dump checksum, a modem handshake, a BBS terminal, an ANSI painter, a MUD, tank and breakout minigames, Erlang B modem pools and more), real history facts with sources, live checks, an improvement loop with two agents (ARTIST + CRITIC, or BUILDER + WEAVER + CRITIC), a gallery and JSON/SVG/OBJ exports.
LIT History facts are tagged LIT and carry a source; AMBER marks approximate figures; MODEL marks fiction, the show references and my art; WALL marks what is not done (no network, no real ROM code, no show art).
MODEL Original pixel cast: ROXY ROM (the punk coder), DEX DEALER (the slick salesman), WRENCH (the hardware engineer), MADGE MODEM (the operations lead), BOSS BEIGE (the boss upstairs), KID CRAWLER (the teenage web builder). Sapphon tie-in: every agent is a sapphon coloured by its CRT phosphor (P3 amber, P1 green, P4 white, P7 blue), one per arc.
proving…
Seal sha256(name|slug|blurb): d9a636994e086e0d24d58b6d8264df2f24054784cc79db766a5dba3f1e63bc96