Dozens of cartridge rooms, in the spirit of the design software that ran from 1963 forward. A constraint sketch console, a pair of node editors, ray-casting and B-rep solid modelers, surfacing and layout and drawing and paint and type and video and the first web browser, and a word processor wearing five faces at once. Every room is listed on the shelf below, with its year.
Cart 017 - WRDZ - is a word processor with five faces: WordStar's chord, WordPerfect's visible codes, the Mac's page, Word's ribbon-and-squiggle, and the modern minimal - one paragraph pushed through each, to feel how the tool shapes the writing.
Plus five theory wings, the B-series. Where the A-series rooms let you use the tools, the B-series lets you hear what the tools were built on: rendering, the page, motion, instruction and generation, each one a run of tracks read aloud, a century and a half of it in total. Turing turns up at both ends of the last two, which was not planned.
Each room is a clean-room reconstruction: chrome extrapolated from period screenshots and manuals, tools written from scratch, no proprietary code or assets used. Each room is one self-contained index.html.
On a phone, every A-series room shows a yellow bar at the bottom - HELP, ROOMS, ABOUT - so the period chrome stays at its 1024-pixel museum scale while reading and navigation get finger-sized. The theory wing is desktop-first.
The cartridges are intentionally not named the originals. Use the folder labels - SP, NDZ, SV, BLD, ALYUS, PM, AI, HC, IB, FM, PS, DIRTR, FG, WWW, DW, FCP, WRDZ, UNRSN, MAYX, HSONE, CANON, CANON2 - as the names of the rooms.
Cart 016 - NDZ - goes back to the TX-2 and the RAND Tablet, where the node editor forked at birth. Sutherland's data-flow graph in 1966 (a node simply is, everything downstream re-settles at once) and Ellis's GRaIL flowchart in 1968 (a token walks the chart, branching, looping) are the two minds every node tool since (Houdini, Nuke, Grasshopper, Blender's shader graph, every wizard, every Blueprint) has quietly inherited. Both playgrounds genuinely run.
The NeXTSTEP rooms are a small constellation. IB (Interface Builder, 1988) is Hullot's invention - drag windows and menus onto canvases, wire them, save the NIB. WWW (WorldWideWeb, 1990) was built in IB by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT Cube - browser and editor in the same window. FM (FrameMaker NS, 1989) sits between them. All three share NeXT's magnesium chrome, blue selection, charcoal titlebars. They point back at CANON track 02, Vannevar Bush's 1945 As We May Think, the memex essay the NeXT was the long-delayed answer to. DW (Dreamweaver, 1997) was still trying to get the editing back.
Classicery is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with any of the companies or persons who created the original software these rooms reference. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Canon audio voiced via ElevenLabs; chapter texts drafted by Claude (ILCA process) with Phil Renato.