This entire site was built in collaboration with Claude Code over the weekend of January 17-18, 2026. A project that would have consumed all my weekends for a year was completed in just two days.
For years, I had this vision of creating a nostalgic journey through computing history. Each era would have its own authentic terminal experience, from the Commodore 64's warm blue glow to the green phosphor of UNIX systems, from Windows 95's familiar taskbar to modern AI interfaces.
But the technical challenge was immense. Each terminal needed its own boot sequence, command interpreter, visual design, audio system, and even games. The scope was paralyzing. I kept the idea in a mental drawer, knowing I lacked either the time or the expertise to execute it properly.
With Claude Code, everything changed. I opened four terminal sessions, each with Claude working on a different part of the site simultaneously. We started not with code, but with conversation - aligning on the vision, the structure, and the experience I wanted to create.
"The design was done solely by prompting. I described what I wanted, and Claude executed my vision, not just technically, but aesthetically. Every pixel, every animation, every interaction."
What struck me most was how natural it felt. I didn't write code. I described experiences. "The C64 should boot with that characteristic blue screen and play BASIC ready." "The Windows 95 terminal needs a working Start menu." "The Amiga should have the disk insert animation."
Claude understood not just the technical requirements, but the emotional ones. The nostalgia I wanted to evoke. The authenticity that would make each terminal feel real to anyone who lived through that era.
Twenty years ago, I was a developer. I wrote code, debugged systems, and shipped products. Then I moved into leadership, managing teams of developers and designers, reviewing architectures, guiding technical decisions. I stopped writing code daily, but I never stopped thinking in code.
This background is exactly what makes Claude Code so powerful for me. I speak the language.
Impossible? Possible. This is more than a mantra. It's a sea change that will allow creators and builders to fully explore their creativity and imagination. The ideas that once lived only in our heads can now become reality.
This project was built using a specific workflow that combines local development with remote AI compute power, enabling multiple parallel Claude sessions.
The site is intentionally simple. No build tools, no frameworks, no dependencies to update. Just files served directly to the browser, ensuring it will work unchanged for years.
No React, no Vue, no build step. Every terminal, every game, every shader is hand-crafted through conversation with Claude, each one a self-contained HTML file that just works.
Building authentic terminal emulators required meticulous attention to historical accuracy. Each system has its quirks, color palettes, and technical specifications that needed to be researched and implemented correctly.
The homepage features AI-generated videos of vintage computers on desks, filmed at natural camera angles. The terminal emulators needed to appear inside those screens — but a monitor seen in perspective isn't a rectangle. It's a trapezoid.
A standard HTML iframe is always rectangular. Simply positioning one over the screen area
produces an obvious mismatch: straight edges floating over a surface that recedes in
perspective. CSS perspective and rotateY can approximate one axis
of rotation, but can't match an arbitrary four-corner shape. Pre-compositing the terminal
into the video wasn't an option either — the terminal had to remain fully interactive,
clickable, and typeable.
"The solution uses a 4-point homography — the same math behind Photoshop's perspective warp — but computed at runtime in JavaScript and applied as a pure CSS matrix3d transform."
The pipeline works in two stages:
The homography is recomputed on every window resize since the crop region changes, and gracefully falls back to simple positioning when the screen area is too small or when the four corners happen to form a plain rectangle. It's the only way to get a fully interactive HTML element to appear perspective-correct on an arbitrary quadrilateral surface, using only CSS transforms with GPU acceleration.
Not everything we built ended up in the final site. Some experiments were too ambitious, others didn't fit the narrative. But they're still there, waiting to be explored.
This project is a testament to how AI is changing creative work. Not replacing it, augmenting it. I had the vision. I knew what I wanted. What I lacked was the bandwidth to execute it alone.
Claude Code didn't just help me build faster. It helped me build things I couldn't have built at all. The barrier between imagination and implementation has never been lower.