I've nattered a bit about steampunk before - particularly making the observation that I had never heard of it before then, but that some elements of it appealed pretty deeply to me.

(And I watched the movie-version of "Wild, Wild West" again this past weekend when it was on tv. I like the movie better each time I see it, but that may be merely because it's progressively overwriting my memories of the original show with Robert Conrad)

But anyway. I saw this steampunk hack of a flatpanel lcd screen. Isn't that a thing of beauty? Wouldn't you much rather be doing your data analysis or writing your exams or whatever it is you do on a computer on that creation rather than some blandified Dell-box?

I know I would. Oh, I'm not handy enough to hack things (and I think my campus computer services would frown on my altering the standard-issue office computer that, for that matter, doesn't actually belong to me), but I love the idea of an old-typewriter-key style keyboard and all that.

Why does modern industrial design have to be so cold and so ugly? (I know - it's probably a price thing. It's a lot cheaper to house the flatpanel in a plain black plastic frame than to actually design some panache into it. But then again - even a lot of the high end stuff is just frankly ugly).

If I were given an alternate universe - one of those other-dimensional things I mentioned the other day - in which to play God (or at least, set-designer), computers in "my" world would look like the one I've linked to. And cars would look mostly like old Dusenbergs or early-model MGs. And men and women would still wear hats (and I mean, not just when it's cold out). It would be like the 1920s and 30s but without the racism, beginnings of Euro-Fascism, Depression, or prohibition and with better medicine and communications-technology.