I skinned my personal site to look like Mac OS System 7.5.3, the version that came out in 1996. Every section of the site turns into a Finder window you can drag around, resize from the corner, or roll up by its title bar. It took me a while to work out what I was actually nostalgic for.
There's a new button in the header of marcioflorindo.com. Click it and the page gets you back to a time of skeuomorphic interfaces, and every section becomes a window you can drag around a Macintosh desktop. Resize it from the corner. Roll it up by its title bar. Underneath it's the same site it was before, except now it looks like Mac OS System 7.5.3, which came out in 1996.
I built it out of nostalgia and assumed that was the whole explanation. Old interface, warm feeling, memories of the early nineties, looking at the Macintosh a cousin had and thinking it was the most awesome thing I'd ever seen.
Except the thing I was nostalgic for had very little to do with the interface. I grew up when having a computer at home was a remarkable thing, something that only the wealthy could afford to have. But what stayed with me isn't the machine. What stayed was the wonder of poking around, trying to understand what it was capable of, how things worked.
