Unless you were largely cognisant during the late 90s, it's very hard to get across to you just _how_ bristling with positive energy computing was back then, just **look** at this opening screen, it screams "ARE YOU READY TO LEARN MOTHERF*CKER?!".
It has dolphins, in the clouds. How many smartphone apps welcome you with dolphins in clouds?
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Replying to @Kroc@oldbytes.space
@Kroc As a kid the Utopian Scholastic aesthetic was so present everywhere and it really felt like we'd sort of come to the end of history and were looking back at it like we were in a museum.
I'm sure a lot of that was just childhood innocence but also I think there was just a lot more optimism for the future back then.
Replying to @dfstarshine@icosahedron.website
@dfstarshine I believe, in practice, that the style simply comes from digital-typesetting. It finally became possible to print books with full colour digital images anywhere in the page. That had been either prohibitively expensive or impossible in the past, and I think it lead directly to Utopian Scholastic’s design elements of disparate items combined together on the page. Education books no longer had to be boring and digital photo manipulation allowed designers to play with layout in a way they hadn’t been able to before with manual / photo-typesetting
Replying to @Kroc@oldbytes.space
It always fascinates me when someone points out how new iterations of technology removes shackles that everyone had sort of internalised as "that's just how it is".
See also: The concept of a glass teletype and how that changed the world of communications, or Image Recognition + Machine Learning, that has made it possible for researchers to use massive datasets consisting of millions of source images, instead of having to painstakingly digitize tens of images by hand.