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Meridian 7

A fictional 1989 workstation operating system that boots in your browser — eleven programs, six colour schemes, no audio files

Source onlyFree · Open source
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Screenshots

  • The Oyster desktop with the Terminal showing neofetch, a Documents folder, Sweeper, the Tape Deck, the Calculator and About This Workstation open
  • The same desktop repainted in the green Phosphor CRT scheme after typing theme phosphor
  • The Amber scheme with the Handbook's welcome page, the Control Panel's colour schemes and desktop patterns, and a Terminal fortune
  • The startup splash: the Meridian 7 logo, a progress bar and 'Checking disk directory…'

About Meridian 7

Meridian 7 is the operating system of a workstation that never existed, the MS-7 Cartographer, running in a browser tab. It will not show a desktop until the monitor's power button is pressed; then it runs a ROM banner, counts memory, probes the disk, shows a splash screen and plays a startup chime it synthesizes on the spot. It borrows the grammar of the era — hard bevels, 1px outlines, pinstriped title bars, the close box on the left — without cloning any real system. The eleven programs share one filesystem kept in local storage, so a file written in the Terminal opens in Files and Notes, and a picture drawn in Paint opens in the Picture Viewer, and all of it survives a restart. Six colour schemes, including green and amber CRT monochrome, repaint every icon, gauge and desktop pattern together. There is no build step, no framework and no dependency.

Who it's for

Anyone who remembers pinstriped title bars and beige workstations, and anyone who wants to see what one felt like.

What it does

  • A real startup: power button, ROM banner, memory count, splash, synthesized chime
  • Eleven programs: Terminal, Files, Notes, Paint, Picture Viewer, Calculator, Sweeper, Tape Deck, Control Panel, About and a Handbook
  • 39 shell commands over a filesystem every program shares
  • Outline window dragging, resize, zoom, tile and stack, and a task strip
  • Six colour schemes, including green and amber CRT monochrome
  • Every sound, including the Tape Deck's chiptunes, built from oscillators at runtime
  • Files and settings persist across restarts, in local storage only

Behind the build

Every colour is a token — no component hardcodes a hex value — and that one rule is what made the two CRT schemes possible.

It also broke them at first: --ink was doing double duty as both the outline colour and the text colour, which is invisible once the chrome itself is dark, so text got tokens of its own. The power button is load-bearing too. Browsers will not let a page make sound until someone interacts with it, so instead of a 'click to enable audio' banner, that constraint became the first thing on screen.

Information

Runs on
Web app
Status
Source only
Price
Free · Open source
Requires
A modern browser
Source
Public on GitHub
Built with
Vanilla JS & Web Audio
Stack
Vanilla JavaScriptWeb Audio APICanvaslocalStorage

Meridian 7 is source only, for now.

The code is public, but there's no packaged release yet. Build it from the repository today, or leave an email and hear when there's one you can double-click.

Tell me when it shipsView source

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