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I did something like this myself a little while back, knownothing.dev

It’s fun to put together nonstandard interfaces. I had the idea of streaming in text like you were connected by an old modem to a remote system. Never experienced it myself, as I am not old enough, but I found the idea aesthetically pleasing.



I have. It's not quite right, and its off enough to be in the uncanny valley for those who have seen this. Mainly the difference is in how the prompt should be streamed as well, and how the prompt does not re-appear until the command has finished.

With late 1980s character-mode terminals one could do clever things with margins and have a scrolling area in the middle of the screen and an input area at the bottom, so it's not wrong per se. It's just not how things commonly worked. (The clever things brigade were a select few. Mostly the whole screen would scroll.)

A greater than symbol as the prompt character and an e-mail address in the prompt didn't commonly go together, either. If there was an e-mail address, it was some type of Unix shell, and the prompt character was conventionally dollar or hash. If the prompt character was a greater than symbol then it was a BASIC or MS/PC/DR-DOS which didn't do e-mail addresses and multi-user. Again, it's not wrong, as famously prompts can be customized, but it's just ever so slightly off .


> streaming in text

Nowadays people would think your site is an LLM page, since ChatGPT implemented this and now every LLM apparently has to do the same...


You know, I hadn't really considered that.

I do find the text streaming aspect of LLM interfaces to be a charming solution to the latency issue. What's old is new again.




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