Artwork of the Primitives

Time now for a look back at artwork analogous to cave paintings, in terms of the digital world. Of course we all see high-def graphics on our computer screens every day. But it was not always so! Used to be you only got letters and numbers, and a blocky graphic on a screen by itself IF you were lucky. People spent ungodly amounts of time collecting these - you had to dial into separate systems all over the place, select them one by one, and then wait for them to download before you could even think about looking at them. A far cry from the web, eh?

For your perusal - BBS ads!

Character based

Low-bit raster based (Warning! Contains some girlie pictures. Nothing incredibly NSFW on the first page.)

You kids get off my lawn!

Big thanks to my pal Lapsed Cannibal for this podcast discussing Atari 2600 games. I wonder if the chaps in the show are a couple years older than me... they seem to have been old enough at the time to realize Superman and Night Driver were not good games. (In fairness, the latter was a faithful console port of a mid-1970s first person racer, so what should we expect?) Certainly these worthy gents have a certain fogey-ness about them. What do you think? Were the things of your youth better than what exists today - or just more elegant in their simplicity? Vive la difference, I suppose! Now, we have both old and new - and imagine what we'd have thought of today's games if we'd been able to see a preview of them 30 years ago. It would have blown our little kid minds!