These Ancient GIFs Are a Dose of Good Internet #ArtTuesday
via MOTHERBOARD
Thank god for the Internet Archive. Without its efforts, entire treasure troves of data would be lost to linkrot, software obsolescence, and the sands of time. Like this gigantic cache of early computer graphics, originally published by Walnut Creek Software over 25 years ago on a CD-ROM.
It’s called GIFs Galore, and true to its name, it contains thousands and thousands of GIFs. Most of them aren’t animated, because this CD-ROM was published in August 1992, a month before the jpeg was even released, back when the GIF file format was still one of the better choices for a static image.
I was tipped off to this wonderful find by Twitter user Taizou, who loved the GIFs so much he made a Twitter bot that delivers one of these magical images per hour. If you don’t have the patience to sort through such a huge download yourself, it’s a Motherboard-Recommended Follow (™).
The 600+ MB file is organized into subfolders that include “Star Trek,” “Fantasy,” “Sci_Fi,” and intriguingly, “Hunks.” It delivers.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!