Olden Graphic

I started messing with digital graphics as soon as Macpaint came out. Remember "Fatbits," where you could magnify and edit at scale? I made this one as soon as Macpaint supported color, and have used it in various contexts ever since. I love that it tells the story of what it did to me. Who could have imagined Photoshop way back then? I remember attending a talk by Adobe founder John Warnock at Ars Electronica back in the 90s. He said that when he first conceived of PhotoShop, hardware was a long way from being capable of doing what he wanted it to do, but he initiated the project, anyway. He said that he personally nurtured development, lest the leaders of Adobe's most successful product at the time, PostScript, absorb or kill it. He said that wildly innovative projects like that had to be protected, lest other projects, jealous of its budget and skeptical of its timeline, moved against it. The same was true of PDF. In the days of 2400 baud modems, the idea of moving large multimedia documents online was also hard to believe, and had to be similarly protected for years.