The openings that lost
What plays before the eye opens went through seven rounds. Five were thrown away. The sixth found the idea and the seventh shipped it: the shut eye drawn out of a circuit on a 1970 tube, with no words in it.
The job
The eye needs seconds to compile before it can draw. Something has to fill them, and whatever it is becomes the first thing anyone sees of the site.
The rounds
| Round | What was built | Why it went |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Era names in era typefaces over a dark room | No transition, no feeling of arriving |
| 2 | Ink that scribbled the logo, then a drawn cartoon eye | Neither was the eye on the page |
| 3 | The invention of the interface as drawn stages, one dot to a pointer | It played as slides |
| 4 | Phosphor cells spreading like an infection until they formed the 1970 home page | 1970 meant the display, not the page |
| 5 | A chip at the pupil lays circuit traces along the eye, then the tube powers on | No depth, and the eye did not form |
| 6 | The same circuit, then phosphor pixels catch from the wires and form the shut eye | Kept, and rebuilt as round 7 |
it feels sloppy… the transition and the feel is still missing
some SVG shown like a popup slide
1970 does not mean the actual 1970 content … show how the display is formed … an animation for the eye
the complexity is still missing, and the smoothness … and the depth of the eye … formation of eye with each pixel getting formed … and the eye opens up
What shipped
Round seven is round six, finished. A chip sits where the pupil will be and lays a circuit. Phosphor catches along the wires, and the pixels settle into a real picture: a 2 KB still of the live 1970 eye, held shut. The chip becomes the terminal's cursor. When the live eye is ready behind it, the cells split finer until the two pictures are the same picture, and the lids open.
It is one fragment shader on its own small canvas in a worker, so it plays while the eye behind it is still building.
What it taught
Read the verdicts in order and they are one sentence, said four times with more patience each time: the opening for an eye has to be the eye, forming. Everything drawn about the idea lost to the thing itself.