Back when we were talking about hardware, I mentioned that I had gone to buy a PC and the salesperson asked if I wanted to purchase an additional 25MB (that's megabyte, mind you) hard drive for $500. I said in response that I had no use for something like that because I would never be able to fill up a 25MB hard drive in my lifetime. The
3 1/2" floppies were enough for me.
That was around 1988 and the PC I was buying was a
Commodore Amiga 500. Developed by the same company that had created the
Commodore 64 - the best selling PC of all time - the Amiga was well-regarded as the machine to beat. It had 512 MB of memory, expandable to 1GB, an unheard of amount at the time. It's graphical user interface (remember that?) was way ahead of its time and its graphics capabilities were so advanced that television networks used it to make the animations for everything from station identification bumps to the animated opening for Monday Night Football. And of course you could just
mosey through dungeons if that was your thing.
 |
| At the time, these were the most advanced graphics you could get on any PC |
Interesting side note: if you ever saw the movie
Wayne's World, Dana Carvey's character
Garth Algar was actually modeled after his brother, who was one of the developers of the Amiga program
Video Toaster, which not only was a video editor used for the kind of animation just mentioned, the software actually won an Emmy!
The reason I bring all of this up is because just recently, art created by well-known pop-culture artist Andy Warhol - on an Amiga computer using the
GraphiCraft program -
was just discovered on a cache of floppy disks. He made the creations during a collaboration with Amiga, but they weren't discovered until recently.
 |
| Andy Warhol art created on the Amiga |
This is the first discovery of its kind that I can remember, that being digital art created by a well-known artist on a vintage PC., and I suspect it will be the last.
Many people create
digital art today, but Andy Warhol was creating it at the forefront of computer graphics capabilities, over twenty years ago.
 |
| I just threw this picture in because I like it. That's an Amiga 500. |
