retro.syslink gallery
RETRO
a gallery of retro images, held as links
▌ about
retro.sys v1.0RETRO is a gallery of retro images — machines, arcades, tapes, terminals, neon and the rooms they stood in. It works like a bookmark collection rather than a photo library: every entry is a link to a picture that lives somewhere else, on the public archive that publishes it.
The shelves
| Shelf | What is on it |
|---|---|
| MACHINES | Home computers, consoles and the plastic that ran them. |
| ARCADE | Cabinets, coin-ops and the rooms they stood in. |
| MEDIA | Floppies, cassettes, VHS and vinyl — the carriers. |
| BROADCAST | CRTs, monitors, test cards and neon. |
| TELECOM | Modems, handsets and the dial-up age. |
| SPACE | Mission control and the consoles that flew. |
Where the links come from
| Source | Licence | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Wikimedia Commons derivative-only | per file (CC BY, CC BY-SA or public domain) | 221 |
| NASA Image Library allowed | Public Domain (NASA) | 58 |
| Internet Archive allowed | per item (often CC or public domain) | 130 |
Sourcing rules
- robots.txt is respected. The crawler identifies itself with a contact URL, keeps a delay between requests to the same host, and stays inside a per-run request budget.
- Documented APIs are declared, not smuggled. 3 of the sources publish a JSON API for programs; those endpoints are listed in
data/sources.jsonand exempted from robots.txt explicitly, because robots.txt is written for crawlers of human-readable pages. Every image host stays under robots.txt. - No picture is ever downloaded. The one place the pipeline reads image bytes is a 64 KB ranged request to read a header (the dimensions), which is then thrown away.
- Licence and credit travel with the link. Each entry records the licence the source states, the author where one is named, and the landing page to credit.
Keys
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| j / k | next / previous frame (on a frame page) |
| l | next page of the catalogue |
| v | switch between the list and the tile wall |
| t | cycle the tube: green, amber, ice |
| s | scanlines and vignette on or off |
| f | the slow brightness drift of an old tube |
| h | back to the top |
| r | a random frame |
| / | search |
Credits
Corrections, dead links and takedowns: hello@artwoc.com.