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If Facebook, Twitter and Angry Birds were built in the days of DOS or 14.4 Kbps modems, they would've looked much different.
Web editor Jo Luijten has seen those ghosts of technology past, creating a series of smart, funny videos mocking up – literally and figuratively – what social networking sites and videogames might have looked like in the 1980s or '90s. The concept, he said, sprang from watching BBC comedy Look Around You, which parodies educational TV shows of the '70s and '80s.
"The idea of creating a nonexistent world in the past intrigued me," Luijten said in an e-mail to Wired.
Each video functions as a comment on how far internet culture has come in the last two decades (Netscape Navigator, what up?!). They also offer nice little nostalgia trip for anybody old enough to remember the days when one had to insert a new floppy disk to continue playing a videogame.
Luijten's personal favorite is his "If Facebook were invented in the 90s" video, visible in the gallery above along with some of his other creations. To make it, he installed an ancient version of Netscape and ran Windows 3.11. (Easter egg: The woman in the profile picture is Kinna McInroe, who played Nina in the movie Office Space.)
Creating the videos, Luijten said, made him feel like a real programmer, a pursuit he's known he was terrible at since childhood. When he was 11, he made a drawing program for blind people – they could hear the cursor's position based on tones produced as the mouse moved.
It was a disaster.
"I truly believed that I programmed a true magnum opus," said Luijten, 33, who lives in The Netherlands. "My friends laughed their ass off when they saw [it]."
Luijten built his recent time-traveling technology videos using simple tools like QuickBASIC (for the ones that just have text interfaces), Microsoft Paint and Autodesk Animator. The videos are then recorded and edited using open source DOS emulator DOSBox and Windows Movie Maker. He's been posting the homemade videos on his website Squirrel-Monkey since January, with his latest – an '80s send-up of Twitter – going live over the weekend.
Up next? Luijten says he's got his eye on YouTube.
Check out Luijten's videos in the gallery above, then hit the comments section to let us know what other social networking services or mobile games you'd like to see retrofitted with an '80s vibe.
