90s Hacker Aesthetic

[Deleted member 2362]

Welcome to the virtual... or is it real?



In the current era we're accustomed to boring flat design; UIs never made the jump from 2D, Virual Reality is mostly used for porn and basically even grandma knows how a computing interface looks like. But there was a time where UIs were fresh, futuristic and almost real... in media depictions, nonetheless. Back then computing was still this exotic thing that only nerds knew about, so how could you depict it in an interesting and comprehensible way for the population? Ads, movies and all sorts of visual media resorted to a world of 3D as representation of the virtual, impenetrable save for those in the know... Flying through stylish buildings in a dark & cold world made of circuitry, it's all so exciting.


Image from Hackers (1995)

I'm just gonna post a few examples I have in my mind, but before starting, we could see this aesthetic as an evolution of computer magazine ads from the 80s:



And we can't forget TRON (1982):



80s representation of the virtual tended to be colorful and warm, but as the 90s went on, more grimdark and crude representations were favored, culminating in The Matrix and the tearful green characters we all know about.



Let's however highlight some examples in between those two points. The previously mentioned Hackers from 1995 remains one of the most successful examples of the 90s hacker aesthetic. A lot of cheese and camp turned a once mocked film into a cult classic.


Woah... I'm gonna HACK!


cool OST cover


The screen you get when trying to infiltrate Agora Road's mainframe



Also in that same year, The Net was released, one of the most successful hits of 1995 and now completely forgotten. Perhaps because it wasn't as cheesy as Hackers. But it wasn't the one, films like Virtuosity and Johnny Mnemonic also contributed to the imagination of audiences in that very same year. The mid 90s were the place to be to enjoy the fad, perhaps helped by the growing adoption of the internet, Windows 95 and the rising popularity of CGI







The entire decade loved portraying UIs using some imagination:





Do you have any favorite examples you want to share? Tell and let's hack the planet

 

[Kolph]

 

[lain is here]

A lot of people involved with cyberculture in the 90's were psychedelic heads, and the trippy vibe of the aesthetics from then reflect this. Now you have straight laced sissies like Mark Zuckerberg who probably never even touched alcohol, let alone any other kind of drug running the show. Now everything is dull and uninspired. Give me Terence Mckenna's psychedelically inspired net back

 

[CognacDefender]

A lot of people involved with cyberculture in the 90's were psychedelic heads, and the trippy vibe of the aesthetics from then reflect this. Now you have straight laced sissies like Mark Zuckerberg who probably never even touched alcohol, let alone any other kind of drug running the show. Now everything is dull and uninspired. Give me Terence Mckenna's psychedelically inspired net back

The Zuck has never tried alcohol because sulphites are poisonous to reptiles.

 

[illautomatic]

Great post, OP! Not much to say, but I just want to mention one of my favorite shows as a kid: Reboot!

View: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLhOnau-tupSMTaCvnxClOIZgSEyPpGnt

 

[Still a Youth]

where are we now?

 

[Mеченый Яков]

 

[Mеченый Яков]

My hacker aesthetics:

 

[xdsoftware]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUsWBCH8Ch8

 

[infamous witness]

"All right I'm in"

 

[MorphedSnowman]

how could you depict it in an interesting and comprehensible way for the population? Ads, movies and all sorts of visual media resorted to a world of 3D as representation of the virtual, impenetrable save for those in the know... Flying through stylish buildings in a dark & cold world made of circuitry,

Why the internet doesn't look like that is obvious, but does anyone remember when firefox allowed you to view pages in 3D? Useless as it gets, but made me wow at first.

 

[lingo]

system shock's cyberspace has that 90s hacking into the mainframe look

 

[no_chill]

Oh fuck yeah this is the shit

 

[IlluminatiPirate]

Why the internet doesn't look like that is obvious, but does anyone remember when firefox allowed you to view pages in 3D? Useless as it gets, but made me wow at first.

That seems like it would be extremely hard to read stuff

 

[MorphedSnowman]

That seems like it would be extremely hard to read stuff

It was. It really had no purpose outside of "wow 3D!!!", but cool > usability

 

[IlluminatiPirate]

It was. It really had no purpose outside of "wow 3D!!!", but cool > usability

I know Mozilla made Hubs its like a virtually reality webpage that you can create a room and use voice chat. That also has no real function and I'm not sure how Mozilla will monetize that.

 

[MorphedSnowman]

I know Mozilla made Hubs its like a virtually reality webpage that you can create a room and use voice chat. That also has no real function and I'm not sure how Mozilla will monetize that.

Knowing Mozilla, they probably won't. Mozilla has a few of cool thing that shouldn't exist, but they somehow do. They apparently have open source voice dataset that you can run machine learning on. I guess it's a plus side of surviving off free money from google just so that they don't run into antitrust laws. You learned from that hubs thing through the yesterdayweb room in there? I checked it out, it was empty so far people are considered, but it had few models and images plastered on the walls.

 

[brentw]

View attachment 17251

View: https://youtu.be/uOa-ObWPAKg

 

[MySpace Tom]

This thread needs more Future Sound of London (which if you haven't heard them, please listen to the album Lifeforms right away)


And a more demoscene

 

[Oxygen65]

Mondo 2000 magazine had great examples of wacky, psychedelic hacker aesthetics.

Inside ‘Mondo 2000,’ the cyberpunk magazine that gave us a glimpse of the utopian future that never was

The magazine's founder R.U. Sirius talks with Claire L. Evans about internet culture's psychedelic early days and its clusterfuck present

www.documentjournal.com

Mondo 2000 - Issue 01 (AKA Reality Hackers Issue 07) : Mondo 2000 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Mondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual...

archive.org

Also great UIs that never were, any computer screen and control panel in Bubblegum Crisis.