Thursday, January 16th, 2020
Space Imagery
=============
I was going through my stuff at parents' house, trying to do first
round of sorting out stuff to be thrown away. I don't live there since
2003, when I went to the college, and yet still have several closets
full of things, my computer table, even my old posters of Modern
Talking still hang on the wall. I was quite successful, I filled one
huge box with paper waste, one with plastic waste and one smaller with
broken hardware. During the process I found an old CD called "Space
Imagery". The NASA logo on the front of the CD box immediately brought
me a strong nostalgia.
Somewhere around 1998, I already moved from ZX Spectrum clone to
a PC-compatible machine. It was an huge, ancient, noisy 286-based box,
but it was a PC. In the 90's my parents didn't have exactly huge wages
and this simply was what they could afford to buy me (I was 14).
Despite its shortcomings I loved the machine. I learned Pascal on it
(TurboBasic couldn't do graphics on Hercules InColor, TurboPascal
could, easy choice). I spent all free time in computer lab at my
highschool and downloaded shareware and freeware from FTP and Gopher
servers to two 3.5" floppy disks (I didn't have more of them), then
copied it on computer in my mother's office to three 5.25" disks and
tried it during evening to see what would work and what won't.
Then I visited biggest computer fair in the Central and Eastern Europe
(Invex). I was amazed about everything I saw there. When you see
things like SGI O2 or PowerMac G3 and have a 286 box at home, you
simply have to be amazed. One section of the fair was called
Multimedia and apart from watching and trying, you could also buy
there various multimedia CDs. My PC didn't have the CD-ROM drive, it
didn't even have an IDE/ATA/ATAPI controller, as my (40MB) hard drive
was connected through a prehistoric ST-506/412 interface. Still when
I saw the CD called "Space Imagery" in a huge discount, I bought it.
The reason for the discount was quite humorous: all executable files
on the CD were infected with the infamous Doom 2 Death virus, so if
you ran any of them and had a pirated copy of Doom 2 on your drive,
you could say bye-bye to all your data. The company knew that, warned
every customer about that and sold CDs in discount. For me that was no
problem. None of the software on the CD would work without at least
VGA graphics, so I had no interest in it. But there was more than four
hundred photos in GIF format and there was a public domain tool called
HERCVIEW which could display it even on my computer.
I used the Windows NT server in our lab, which was the only one in the
whole school that had a CD drive (double speed, with caddy), copied
the photos and watched them at home, dithered to just orange and
black[1]. Some looked great this way, some didn't - I could squeeze
about seven of them on one floppy, so I had a fresh batch of fourteen
space images couple of times every week. That was something!
Nowadays it seems almost funny, that the CD box says "full color,
hi-res photos" and they in fact are scanned from photographic film in
resolution usualy around 640x480 with 256 colors, but at that
exact time I even didn't have anything to display photo with such
parameters. Now I do and probably even most of the world does, so
I decided to put the content of the CD online on my Gopher. There were
several corrupted files with broken or missing header and some files
with GIF extension but with unknown content. I repaired, what could be
repaired and deleted the rest - that's why there are some numbers
missing. Still more than four hundred breathtaking pieces of space
imagery await you. You will probably never enjoy them as much as I did
twenty one years ago, but you are welcome to try! [2]
[1]
http://technomorous.eu/images/space_imagery_hercules.png
[2]
gopher://i-logout.cz/1/spaceimagery/