Kulturbytes
A 256 byte intro by Haujobb
Rising lines, flickering boxes, a scrolling text: ‘POKES und PEEKS – KULTURBYTES’.
All in just 256 bytes – smaller than a blank Word document. A wink for nerds. A statement for culture. A tribute to code, bugs, imagination.
The above screenshot was generated from running the 256 Byte file “kb.com” under the x86 emulator DOSBox on a modern PC. A hexdump of the binary-file can be seen in the second picture. Download the binary and the source here: kulturbytes.zip (20.610 Bytes).
This intro was coded by Sensenstahl on request of myself. It was created in the context of the thematic focus ‘Verpixelte Welt – Von alten Computern und neuer Kunst’ (issue 7/8 2025) of the newspaper “Politik & Kultur”, Germany’s largest cultural policy newspaper. Read Noname’s article “Demoszene – Leuchtende Subkultur” (page 25) and all the other articles of this highly interesting issue. 14 pages on our digital culture! Find it at www.dig-id.de/pk/, subscribe here, or read the PDF.
Released on 30.06.2025 at the Poke & Peek event at the Computerspielemuseum Berlin
feat. rbb 24 Inforadio w/ Olaf Zimmermann, hosted by Harald Asel.
Works under Windows XP. On modern systems, please use FreeDOS or any build of DOSBox to run kb.com. Or watch the video below.
sensenstahl.says
This one was premium delivery service on my part … 😉
noname.bytes
The temporary lossless upscaled video file before export to YouTube was 70 GB,
or 275 million times the size of the executable file “kb.com”.
sensenstahl.greets
The usual suspects + all sizecoders. Keep it up!
noname.greets today
Melkor, Bodo, Venom, Peabrain, Critikill, Virgill
Special greets to Hellfire for fruitful discussions and to
Sensenstahl for premium collaboration service.
There is also a collectible artefact for this release, a wooden plate carrying
an NFC-tag and a QR-Code. Don’t confuse this with NFT, it is a numbered (10)
physical item. c.f. https://x.com/onlinedasein/status/1939322334965309854