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# Introducing 90s.dev

My fellow hackers, artists, engineers, musicians, and philosophers, I am beyond excited to finally share this project with you all!

Behold! os.90s.dev

You should be very confused right now. Let me explain why this project is so incredibly exciting. This ain't your grandpa's toy OS!

A while ago I realized I hadn't remade "Warcraft I" like I wanted to when I first started coding, even though that was about a third of a century ago. So I started coding.

But before I could finish writing the map maker, I had already created a development platform far more interesting than I meant it to be.

# A new platform

90s.dev is a unique content platform. It's a new way to create apps, games, art, music, and code libraries, share them with one another, and collaborate with each other on making these things.

But it does all these in a new, unique way, because it was designed from the ground up to be collaborative, innovative, inspiring, have a pixel art aesthetic, and tend towards making games.

# For Hackers

Nothing today quite captures the experience of writing computer code back when computers were relatively brand new. I wanted to recapture it, and share it with the whole world.

The 90s.dev platform does exactly that. Every aspect of it is designed to be a breath of fresh air, from the GUI to the internals, entirely hackable, and crafted to encourage exploration.

# For Artists

The pixel art aesthetic, though it died around the 2000s sadly, is once more back in style, and growing every year in popularity, with projects like Animal Well regularly renewing its beauty.

The gfx behind 90s.dev is specifically designed with pixel art in mind, optimized to render it efficiently on the slowest devices, and with visual effects at the heart of the render pipeline.

# For Engineers

Unlike other platforms, 90s.dev is not just another throwaway app by a soulless business. It's a very carefully designed system, from top to bottom, with attention paid to every detail.

We're not just going to throw React.js into it and call it a day. A core principle of 90s.dev is to see if we can improve on our precedessors, armed with nothing but the benefit of hindsight.

# For Musicians

Audio is at the heart of everything, present but in the background, subtly influencing the way we experience everything about life, especially in games. A game without audio is lifeless.

90s.dev is a platform that makes it far easier to make apps for making music using the new Web Audio APIs, which will enable the creation of a new music making community!

# For Philosophers

My goals from the beginning have always included creating something that starts from scratch, and rethinks solutions to modern problems from first principles, to see if we can do better.

Limitations always breed creativity. By reducing the platform to a low-resolution, high-density, pixel-art themed OS inside a web browser, we have our work cut out for us. What should it be?

# A community effort

Whether you're an artist who wants to collaborate on games, or a developer that wants to make art making apps, 90s.dev is the perfect place to join forces and make something amazing!

Built from the ground-up specifically for collaboration, 90s.dev has a built-in public folder that effectively becomes something like an app store, package manager, and shared file system.

# What can we build together?

There are so many things we can build together! Just a few that I personally want to make:

# But what is it, really?

All of the above was kind of an outline of the principles that make 90s.dev unique. This is mainly the secret ingredient behind what enables its innovations. But now to be more concrete:

The app os.90s.dev is a web-based operating system that has:

Follow the hello world tour to get a sense of what building an app in 90s.dev is like.

# Why not just use ___?

If you just want to make a game, you're probably better off with Godot. If you're content with React.js, or if you see nothing wrong with CSS, then maybe this isn't the platform for you.

The ethos of 90s.dev is to be deeply passionate about beauty and perfection, to try solving old problems in new ways by thinking far beyond the box, and to create an environment where creativity, fun, and beauty reign supreme.

# Why is it called 90s.dev?

The idea is to pretend everything technological after 1990 didn't happen.

Here, we reside in a sort of retrofuturistic alternate reality, where pixel art aesthetics didn't die but only got prettier with time; where HTML and CSS didn't happen; where JavaScript was born an old man; where React and Vue would have been unnecessary and overcomplicated; where collaboration was always at the heart and soul of the web.

The driving principle behind 90s.dev is rediscovering beauty in simplicity. In fact, the entire website you see here was created from scratch to be the most beautiful website code ever written because of its simplicity, both aesthetically and in code. The same is true of os.90s.dev.

⚠️ Under construction ⚠️