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Secret of the Relic Images
Little did I know chasing one loose end of “how pictures might have got on computer screens in the 1980s” would bump into a different idle pastime of mine. That juxtaposition of two very minor bits of history from the same decade was a bit much for just a few moments.
It wouldn’t have been a surprise without starting innocently. Going from “tailoring GIF files to the capabilities of one old computer” to “taking a chance on viewing GIF files in black and white on other old computers” had seemed just about the end of the road for imagining the early days of that format. Along the way, though, I’d turned up all the bits and pieces to detour onto an even older track. Before GIF images were introduced on CompuServe, a more limited format had been pioneered on that online service, named RLE for Run Length Encoding (now more a building block of general data compression than a method in itself). Some of the antique GIF viewers I’d found also promised to display that previous format, and before that I’d happened on a large yet very focused “file formats catalogued” web site that offered links to a few relic RLE images. On a lark, I picked a small collection from an archive of TRS-80 programs to examine first, then coaxed the files starting with “A” onto an Apple II disk image alongside a multipurpose viewer for that computer.
Having glanced through some period disk images of pictures in different formats for the TRS-80 Color Computer and Model 4, I wasn’t expecting much beyond “clip art.” The first RLE image I loaded was Abraham Lincoln; the second was Albert Einstein. After that, though, one picture I’d pondered the name of I recognized at once as an Alpha Veritech Battloid from Robotech: The New Generation, and then there was a picture of Annie from the same part of the show (although I did, of course, remember their names were different in Genesis Climber Mospeada). I reminded myself the heyday of RLE images had been brief, preceding GIF’s introduction in 1987, which would have coincided with Robotech being on the air.
Loading those first pictures in Apple II emulation had been slow enough I decided to resort to “classic Macintosh” emulation and the viewer program I’d found for it. After importing the fifty-plus files into a hard disk image, though, I found that while the viewer could load some of them it kept turning up error messages for others, including a few of the “A” files I’d already seen. With that, I turned to a modern image converter program. It turned out to be a command-line tool, but I was able to accept that and processed the whole folder in an instant. With that done, though, I recognized just how many of its images were of anime characters the emerging North American fandom of the mid-1980s would have recognized (including multiple characters from Macross: Do You Remember Love, Captain Harlock, two pictures of Kei from Dirty Pair if none of Yuri, and Nausicaä), or at least in the styles thereof (including what, to be somewhat provocative, I want to call “1980s moé”).
As I’d said, delving into an idle interest only to run into another one unexpected did feel a bit much for a few moments. It might also have had something to do with having run “anime pictures” from my own files through processing for display on old computers before, which could sometimes feel a bit indulgent somehow. For someone else to have done that “for me” years ago was almost too convenient. I was also a little conscious that “I like what I like” doesn’t quite engage with “seeing if you’d like something else better” (and that “something else” doesn’t necessarily have to amount to “American comics, animation, and live action TV and movies”). There’s also that constant tension between “trying to promote what you like to others” and “but if they do like it a different way than you...”
Then, I started telling myself the weighting could have been a matter of the person putting the collection together however many years ago. (There was one simple drawing labelled as an Apple IIe, oddly amusing in the context of a “TRS-80 archive,” along with the “Banana Jr” from the Bloom County comic strip and a picture of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, IBM’s advertising mascot in the early 1980s, on a bicycle chased by a tractor-trailer that just might be a “Mac” truck.) The images are shorn of just about all context (although so far as trying to date them goes, the collection included a picture of Christa McAuliffe, as “1986” as you can get in a most unfortunate way); the handful of scanned anime club newsletters and fanzines from the period I’ve happened on are more involving that way. At the same time, though, the hint of “interest in anime” beginning to reach out through new communications methods that early on was a bit intriguing in the end.
It wouldn’t have been a surprise without starting innocently. Going from “tailoring GIF files to the capabilities of one old computer” to “taking a chance on viewing GIF files in black and white on other old computers” had seemed just about the end of the road for imagining the early days of that format. Along the way, though, I’d turned up all the bits and pieces to detour onto an even older track. Before GIF images were introduced on CompuServe, a more limited format had been pioneered on that online service, named RLE for Run Length Encoding (now more a building block of general data compression than a method in itself). Some of the antique GIF viewers I’d found also promised to display that previous format, and before that I’d happened on a large yet very focused “file formats catalogued” web site that offered links to a few relic RLE images. On a lark, I picked a small collection from an archive of TRS-80 programs to examine first, then coaxed the files starting with “A” onto an Apple II disk image alongside a multipurpose viewer for that computer.
Having glanced through some period disk images of pictures in different formats for the TRS-80 Color Computer and Model 4, I wasn’t expecting much beyond “clip art.” The first RLE image I loaded was Abraham Lincoln; the second was Albert Einstein. After that, though, one picture I’d pondered the name of I recognized at once as an Alpha Veritech Battloid from Robotech: The New Generation, and then there was a picture of Annie from the same part of the show (although I did, of course, remember their names were different in Genesis Climber Mospeada). I reminded myself the heyday of RLE images had been brief, preceding GIF’s introduction in 1987, which would have coincided with Robotech being on the air.
Loading those first pictures in Apple II emulation had been slow enough I decided to resort to “classic Macintosh” emulation and the viewer program I’d found for it. After importing the fifty-plus files into a hard disk image, though, I found that while the viewer could load some of them it kept turning up error messages for others, including a few of the “A” files I’d already seen. With that, I turned to a modern image converter program. It turned out to be a command-line tool, but I was able to accept that and processed the whole folder in an instant. With that done, though, I recognized just how many of its images were of anime characters the emerging North American fandom of the mid-1980s would have recognized (including multiple characters from Macross: Do You Remember Love, Captain Harlock, two pictures of Kei from Dirty Pair if none of Yuri, and Nausicaä), or at least in the styles thereof (including what, to be somewhat provocative, I want to call “1980s moé”).
As I’d said, delving into an idle interest only to run into another one unexpected did feel a bit much for a few moments. It might also have had something to do with having run “anime pictures” from my own files through processing for display on old computers before, which could sometimes feel a bit indulgent somehow. For someone else to have done that “for me” years ago was almost too convenient. I was also a little conscious that “I like what I like” doesn’t quite engage with “seeing if you’d like something else better” (and that “something else” doesn’t necessarily have to amount to “American comics, animation, and live action TV and movies”). There’s also that constant tension between “trying to promote what you like to others” and “but if they do like it a different way than you...”
Then, I started telling myself the weighting could have been a matter of the person putting the collection together however many years ago. (There was one simple drawing labelled as an Apple IIe, oddly amusing in the context of a “TRS-80 archive,” along with the “Banana Jr” from the Bloom County comic strip and a picture of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, IBM’s advertising mascot in the early 1980s, on a bicycle chased by a tractor-trailer that just might be a “Mac” truck.) The images are shorn of just about all context (although so far as trying to date them goes, the collection included a picture of Christa McAuliffe, as “1986” as you can get in a most unfortunate way); the handful of scanned anime club newsletters and fanzines from the period I’ve happened on are more involving that way. At the same time, though, the hint of “interest in anime” beginning to reach out through new communications methods that early on was a bit intriguing in the end.
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(the image is here: https://terebifunhouse.tumblr.com/post/642157530944028672/1980s-8-bit-gif-space-battleship-yamato-fan )
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When it comes to "anime art on a computer," though, I did get to remembering discovering on a CD-ROM in the early 1990s some old MacPaint files of the Macross: Do You Remember Love? characters, at a moment when I was still pretty foggy about "the background of Robotech." It might not have registered on me too much (I have to admit some of the movie's costume designs still don't appeal to me as much as they do to others), but I do remember one Valkyrie picture made the renditions in the Robotech RPG look kind of clunky... As I'm able to go back to the files now, I did some double-checking and came to the suspicion some of the just-discovered RLE images had been cropped down from them.