Cafe Washburn Is Back. The BFG Was Probably Unnecessary.

Aug 24

5 min read

A dramatic BFG-style weapon glowing green next to a vintage computer showing an error dialog, coffee mug, notebook, and headphones on a dark background

This whole thing started with one stupid little thought: That would be cool.

That was really it.

No grand idea about creating some new digital experience. I just saw a website that looked like a computer desktop and thought, yeah, I want to mess with that.

So I did.

A desktop. A few icons. Some windows. Maybe a couple of apps.

Projects. Articles. Photography. Files. Music. Messages.

Basically, a fake little computer full of the stuff I already do.

And because this is apparently how my brain works, “that would be cool” very quickly turned into: “Well, now it needs to actually work.”

It was a stupid idea. Not bad stupid. AWESOME stupid.

The kind of idea that's easy to dismiss because it doesn't seem especially useful, but interesting enough that you want to follow it around for a while and see what happens.

So I started screwing around with it. Then it started turning into something. Which is usually where I get into trouble.

It Was Supposed to Be Simple

The original idea was not complicated.

Make a desktop. Put some icons on it. Open a few windows. Make it feel like a computer. That would've been enough. But once the desktop existed, it became obvious that it needed to behave like a computer.

The windows needed to move. The applications needed to actually do something. And every time I looked at it, another thought appeared: That would be cool too.

That is an extremely efficient way to lose an afternoon.

Eventually it stopped feeling like a mockup and started feeling like a little environment.

Projects opens my project archive. Articles pulls in the latest stuff from RichWashburn.com. Photography looks like a folder full of image files.

Files is an actual directory where I can drop prompts, skills, Markdown files, code and whatever else somebody might want. Messages lets you ping at me. Work Amp is there because people keep asking me what I listen to while I work.

None of this was really planned. It just kept surviving the next stupid idea.

RichWashburn.com Is Still Home Base

That hasn't changed. That's where everything lives.

Years of writing, projects, photography, experiments, hardware, AI, software, business stuff and assorted evidence of poor impulse control.

Cafe Washburn just accidentally became another way into the same world.

An awesomer way.

One is the normal website. The other one boots.

Best of both worlds. You know.

Like a mullet.

Obviously AI Is Why This Exists at All

A few years ago I probably would've had this exact idea, smiled at it, thought about how much work was hiding behind it, and wisely moved on with my life.

That calculation is different now. AI makes the distance between “That would be cool” and “Well, shit. It works.” dangerously short.

Instead of spending three weekends hand-building a goofy desktop experiment, I could just keep throwing ideas at it and seeing which ones survived.

Most stupid ideas used to die from friction. Now some of them get a fighting chance.

Apparently this one did.

Then I Remembered Cafe Washburn

The domain wasn't even part of the idea. The thing was basically done before I thought of it.

Years ago, I used to own CafeWashburn.com. It was my blog. Nothing legendary. Apparently not even remotely legendary, because I checked the Wayback Machine and found basically nothing.

So Cafe Washburn was evidently much more important to me than it was to the historical preservation of the internet. Fair enough. I'm certainly more important to myself now.

Anyway, once the desktop existed, I suddenly thought: Wait. Cafe Washburn.

Checked the domain. Available. Because, really, what idiot was going to own that? Registered it. Attached it. Boom. Cafe Washburn was back.

Except now it was a computer. As one does.

Then It Got a Terminal

Because obviously. If you're going to build a fake computer, at some point somebody is going to demand a command line.

So Rich OS has one. rich@cafe:~$

And it actually does things. You can open projects. Open articles. Open files. Reboot the machine.

Ask it for system information.

It will reliably tell you things like:

GPU: Yes

COFFEE: Required

SCALE: Limit not found

Very serious infrastructure.

There are a few other Easter eggs buried in there. And one command that started as a joke. doom

This is where things became inevitable.

And Then There Was DOOM

I have history with this. A veteran, if you will. LOL.

Back around the original Cafe Washburn era, I worked for a medical back-office services company. There were about four of us on the IT/dev side sitting in a room together, responsible for real systems.

Medical dictation. Production infrastructure. Things grown adults were presumably paying us to take seriously. And we had a DOOM server.

Racked, naturally. We weren't irresponsible in that particular way.

I mean an actual dedicated DOOM server. Near the medical systems. We played constantly. One machine was helping move healthcare information.

Another was helping determine which member of the IT department needed a rocket launcher to the face.

Both were infrastructure.

So decades later, when a doom command appeared inside the terminal of my fake operating system, the joke practically wrote itself.

At first it just said:

DOOM compatibility is a core system requirement.

Which was funny.

That should have been enough. Except I had recently written about DOOM running on Canon cameras and proposed that “Will it run DOOM?” should essentially become part of QA.

If it runs DOOM, stamp the box. DOOM CERTIFIED.

So now I had created an operating system. I couldn't exactly let it fail certification.

Of Course It Had to Run DOOM

Now you type: rich@cafe:~$ doom

The system responds: DOOM compatibility is a core system requirement.

Launching shareware episode...

And actual DOOM opens. Playable. In a draggable window. Inside Rich OS.

Inside CafeWashburn.com.

And at that point the entire project achieved its final form.

Yes, there's a live article feed. Yes, there are projects, downloadable files, photography and messaging and music and all sorts of legitimately useful stuff. Whatever.

It runs DOOM.

The rest is supporting infrastructure.

RichWashburn.com has years of writing, professional work, projects and accumulated credibility. But it does not run DOOM.

Cafe Washburn has been back for approximately five minutes and has already corrected this embarrassing deficiency.

DOOM CERTIFIED.

Ship it.

That's Pretty Much the Story

A stupid experiment turned out better than it had any right to.

AI made it cheap enough to keep following the stupid ideas. An old domain unexpectedly found a new job. And now I have two doors into roughly the same little world.

One looks like a website. The other looks like somebody left their computer unlocked... and apparently there's a BFG lying around.

If you're the kind of person who starts poking at things and eventually asks: What else can this thing do?

Well...DOOM COMPATIBILITY ........ CONFIRMED 🙌