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/