Watch for falling cats
Hey, look what I found in a forgotten corner of my hard drive (I clean my hard drive to relax; I’ve had a molten asshole of a day).
This was the very first placeholder graphic on my very first corner of the Web — that free meg of space ISP’s gave you. I figured out early on I could cram in much more art per byte by sticking with monochrome. Small file sizes were, of course, seriously important then.
“Then” would’ve been, maybe, 1994? I think that’s the year I first saw the Web. I had read Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web concept paper via Usenet in 1990 and thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. People creating content for free, and letting other people link to it? Pff! Stupid hippies!
But then, a few years later, a friend showed me the Web in action, and then I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. Seriously, the early Web was lame-o, lame-o. Until there was a certain critical mass of content, it wasn’t good for much at all. It wasn’t even that fun. And it was ugly.
Except for Find the Spam (lovingly reproduced with historic exactitude here). I thought Find the Spam was the most hysterical thing I’d ever seen in my life ever. Like, ever. Odd, though…when I laughed, dilithium crystals shot out of my nose.
Anyhow, I wish I could remember where this drawing is. I think it’s much better than it looks in this grievously squoze-down version. The odd part is…how did I get it in the computer? Monitors of the era were capable of much better graphics than you usually saw on them, because there was no way to get pictures in. It was way before digital still cameras (we had a video camera that could frame-grab; the whole setup cost around a hundred grand). I think it was before those horrible little hand scanners (remember those?). Maybe we had desktop scanners at work by then.
Cat blogging. I been doing it a long, long time.
March 22, 2007 — 5:33 pm
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