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memoirs
of early computer work
Computers
have revolutionized the way many people work. Artists have also been affected
by this change.
This a short sampling of my work in the last decade.
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1985
The year of 8 bits colors
Spectrum ZX, Sinclair
The ZX Spectrum. Introduced by Sir Clive Sinclair
in 1982, it proved to be a huge hit in the home.
The machine was small, smaller than any laptop available today.
It plugged into a standard television set and used a standard tape
recorder for storage. It was equipped with 48K of ram.
 The
screen resolution was 256x192 pixels, with the area outside this
being the border. The palette was 16 colours, which cannot be changed.
The screen was split onto an 8x8 grid, with each grid square having
64 (8x8) pixels in it, and it's own foreground/background colours,
INK and PAPER colours.
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The spectrum was incredibly well
designed and it is the amazing British design which put it in good
stead for an entire decade.
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1989
Digital brush strokes
Apple IICI and Supermac, PixelPaint Professional
 This
work was awared as "the second place winner in the Miscelaneous
category of the second annual PixelPaint art competition".
PixelPaint Professional was a universal paint program, although it
suported any color depth from 8-to 32-bits hardware. This particular
work was done only in 8bits colors using custom palettes and a vast
selection of advanced tools. Like graduated fills, transparency, dynamic
masking and in these days "the most sophisticated airbrush around".
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The Mac IIci was a powerful, cutting-edge, expandable computer
in a small, easily accessible case. It's based on a 25 MHz
68030 processor and includes such cutting edge (in 1989) features
as a paged-memory manager, floating-point processor, 32-bit
system bus and 32 bit clean ROMs.
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Smoothing rough
edges 1990
Apple IICi and Adobe Photoshop
 Few
products are as important to the computer graphics as Photoshop.
It helped drive the desktop publishing revolution, and it's been
a valuable tool in the emergence of Web design
Shipped February 1990 photosho 1.0 Featured: Full
palette of tools for creating images from scratch, as well as
for editing, altering, and enhancing existing artwork. What We
Said Then: "Photoshop is easy to use. Considering the vast
number of features and tools involved..., Adobe has done a good
job of keeping things organized and simple."
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1991Tracing
the path of a ray of light
Apple IICi and Infini-D
Infini-D is the standard for professional 3D animation
and design.
Infini-D has won virtually every award in the industry for its selection
of intuitive, professional features. This powerful tool is used for
a
variety of applications, including video, multimedia, print and graphic
design. Infini-D combines professional 3D SplineForm(tm) modeling,
photorealistic rendering and broadcast-quality animation in one
easy-to-learn program. Infini-D integrates seamlessly with applications
like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and Macromedia Director.
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Raising
resolution 1995
Apple IICi and Collage
 Specular
Collage was the first program on the Macintosh to take advantage
of proxy-based image editing. Unlike Adobe Photoshop, which applies
all edits directly to the pixels in the original image–thereby
slowing down the editing process and potentially degrading the image
quality over time–Collage displays the effects of your edits
on screen using a low-resolution proxy. As a result, most edits
complete in a matter of seconds, regardless of the image size, and
the original image data remains unscathed. Once you finish a composition,
you can render it to disk at any resolution. Only then does Collage
apply your edits to each and every pixel in the original high-resolution
image. However, it does this in RAM and outputs to a new image file,
thus protecting the original image file on disk.
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The PowerMac 9500 was the first second generation PowerMac,
the 9500 was introduced in May 1995, and is still most expandable
PowerMac ever. It was powered by either a 120 or 132 Mhz 604
processor, a second-generation PowerPC chip which was considerably
faster than its predecessor, the 601. The big news about the
9500, however, was its 6 PCI slots. It was the first Mac to
comply with the PCI industry standard. The 9500 came in a
full tower case, and had 7 internal drive bays. Like the old
Mac II, the 9500 came with no graphics capability--a third
party add-on card was required.
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