About this terminal.

What If I Bought is a small entertainment site, not a calculator. You pick a decade and a scenario, and a decade-themed terminal warps through time to show you what that money would be worth today. Eleven counterfactuals, five themed eras, one wormhole. It is built for the feeling: the punch of seeing “$1,000 → $38.5M” flash up in a 1965 IBM mainframe aesthetic, not the math.

The design lineage is the point of the project. Each decade gets its own visual stack: a mainframe job queue on tractor-feed printer paper for the 60s, a Telex strip for the 70s, the cyan-on-blue PC-DOS card this page is rendered in for the 80s, a POSIX bash prompt for the 90s, and a full-fat Matrix-rain HACK//OS terminal for the 2010s. Switching decades is meant to feel like changing operating systems, not just changing color palettes.

Tech credits are short: Next.js App Router as a static export on Cloudflare, hand-rolled wormhole transition in pure CSS keyframes and a tiny RAF counter,next/og for the per-route social cards. No third-party charting libs. No monetization. No ads, no upsell. The site exists to be shared.

If you liked it, the highest-value thing you can do is send a friend a deep link: every reveal is screenshot-able and every URL is share-stable.