Why this publication is set in forty columns

A reader arriving here for the first time sees a blue screen, a light-blue border and a logo made of block characters, and might reasonably wonder whether the reporting underneath is a joke. It is not, and this note is an attempt to explain the decision before anyone has to ask.

Most of what this publication covers was first experienced on exactly this kind of screen. The Commodore 64 sold in the millions and, for a large share of the people who later built the industry, it was the machine on which they first typed a program, first dialled a bulletin board and first read a text file written by a stranger. The boards themselves were the first public medium most of those people wrote for. Jason Scott's documentary on the dial-up era makes the case at length that the bulletin board was a social institution and not a technical footnote; we agree, and we think the way to cover that institution is from the inside of it.

So the site is a board. The main menu has a key for every section. News arrives as bulletins, long pieces read as messages in a message base, programs live in a file area, and the masthead is the user list. By default you are a caller on a Commodore 64 in forty columns, because that is where most callers were. Press 8 and the board switches to eighty columns, the way a Commodore 128 did when you pressed its 40/80 key. Open the other-systems list and the same board can be read through the screens of the DOS packages that defined the scene from 1990 onward, each reproduced from its original distribution files rather than imitated.

What that presentation costs is real, and we would rather name the costs than pretend they are not there. Forty columns is a narrow measure, and long pieces are long scrolls. A terminal has no typographic hierarchy beyond colour and capitals. Images are an interruption rather than a layout element. Readers who have never used a character-mode interface have to learn that the letter in brackets is a key.

Three rules keep the aesthetic from getting in the way of the journalism. The first is that the screen is a presentation layer and nothing else. Every page is ordinary HTML underneath, with headings, lists, links and figures that a screen reader, a search engine or a text browser sees as a normal publication; the art that decorates a menu is marked as decoration, and the menu itself is a list of links. The second is that the layout reflows. The grid is sized from the width of your window, so forty or eighty columns always fit without sideways scrolling, and if you enlarge your browser's text the columns shrink to match rather than overflow, which is what the accessibility guidelines ask of any page and what a terminal, oddly, makes easy. The third is that nothing about the presentation touches the content. The same piece, with the same sources and the same verification date, appears in every theme. A theme can change the colour of a byline; it cannot change what the byline says.

There is a fourth rule, which is really a tone. The board is not a costume. We do not write in the voice of 1987, we do not pretend the modern machines and the modern scene do not exist, and we do not use the nostalgia of the surface as a substitute for reporting. Every claim on this site is sourced and dated, corrections are logged in public, and a piece that cannot meet that standard does not run, however good it would look in PETSCII.

The one-line maze that opens our type-in section has been written about at book length, by ten authors who concluded that a single line of BASIC could carry a culture. That is the bet this publication makes about the screen it is drawn on. If the bet is wrong, the facts will still be here, in plain HTML, for anyone who turns the theme off.