Why green?

Nostalgia is an interesting thing...

I still remember the awe of the first time I saw a computer with a dedicated monitor. It was an XT with something like a 9" display, green only. You'd need a 5 1/4 floppy disk to boot the OS, then when you saw a C:\> that meant you could swap floppies and load Prince of Persia to have some fun. 360kb of code on each disk. Waiting time and weird noises.

We're talking the 80s, the time when I watched TRON for the first time (the 1982 version) and imagined how life could be in the grid, inside those PCBs that we have to cobble together to assemble a computer.

Those were the times that if you wanted a computer, you had to research, find and assemble the boards. The first Apple computer was a kit for nerds, hard to imagine when I type these words on a unibody-glued-almost-non-fixable machine.

This is the feeling that we have when we 3D print things, write code, run a server (that actually works). The tinkerer, the maker, the hacker.

And the green text on a black screen, the first CRT I saw in the 80s was a symbol of all that. Discovery, curiosity, and all other probe names NASA came up with. This is what makes us feel alive. CRTs are an electron gun firing at a glass screen coated with phosphor. Then it lights up where the beam hits it.

Do that fast enough and your brain sees a picture. Not pixels like we have now, it's a chemical reaction. The glow exists for a moment, then fades. Hence the ghosting and scanlines. All that stuff we spent the next forty years trying to get rid of.

That's why you're reading those words on a website that looks like it was built in another era. We want to feel that awe again. To put things together and create something.

Then comes AI

Forty years later, the black screen is back. We spent forty years building shiny interfaces, then AI showed up and pulled us right back to the prompt.

It's interesting to realize that today, in 2026, the best way to create something with AI is in the terminal. The same old black screen where you type stuff and talk to the computer. And it answers back.

A terminal doesn't try to engage you. It sits there, waiting for you to type something. On the modern web, everything is infinite scrolling. On the terminal, you only have a blinking cursor, as if it was asking you...

$ what do you want to make?

That's why our site looks like this ^*.

We consider that computers are materials to build something, not appliances.

That's lokaalhost:22. A room in Amsterdam where people show up and plug things or ideas in. It's where we can be inspired by the unknown, the "I think that will work".

lokaal means "room" or "classroom" in het Nederlands, localhost is a hostname that refers to your own computer. A way for your computer to communicate with itself through a loopback connection. 22 is our room's number in Lokaal432, a creative community hub in IJburg, Amsterdam. It's also the default SSH port, and localhost:22 is how you'd refer to an SSH connection to your own machine. I know, it's geeky and quirky. That's also us.

A space for creatives, hackers, tinkerers, makers. There's no place like 127.0.0.1.

^* We've made some themes on the site as well, because in the old days, screens could be green, but also amber and white.