Beige Buttons

Back before PCs were black, they were beige. And even further back, they’d have not only “Reset” and “Power” buttons, but also a “Turbo” button.

I’m not here to tell you what it did1. No, I’m here to show you how to re-live those glory days with a Turbo button of your very own, implemented as a reusable Web Component that you can install on your very own website:

Placeholder image showing beige buttons - reset and turbo - on a PC case.
Go on, press the Turbo button and see what happens.
(Don’t press the Reset button; other people are using this website!)

If you’d like some beige buttons of your own, you can get them at Beige-Buttons.DanQ.dev. Two lines of code and you can pop them on any website you like. Also, it’s open-source under the Unlicense so you can take it, break it, or do what you like with it.

I’ve been slumming it in some Web Revivalist circles lately, and it might show. Best Resolution (with all its 88×31s2), which I launched last month, for example.

You might anticipate seeing more retro fun-and-weird going on here. You might be right.

Close-up photo of a computer with reset and turbo buttons in the style mirrored by my component.
This photo was my primary inspiration for the design of these buttons. I’m pretty sure I had a case of this design once! This photo courtesy Rainer Knäpper, used under the Free Art License.

Now… be honest – how many of you pressed the “reset” button even though you were told not to?

Footnotes

1 If you know, you know. And if you don’t, then take a look at the website for my new web component, which has an “about” section.

2 I guess that’s another “if you know, you know”, but at least you’ll get fewer conflicting answers if you search for an explanation than you will if you try to understand the turbo button.

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2 comments

  1. Spencer Spencer says:

    I’d like to apologize to anyone using the website when I pressed the reset button.

    Fortunately, I had the turbo button enabled at the time, so the reboot was relatively fast, unlike the approximately 10 minutes that I remember computers from this era taking to boot.

    1. Dan Q Dan Q says:

      Oh no! I hadn’t saved my work!

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