Above, is the first GIF I ever saw.
What you are looking at is a scan of a color printout that I made with my Okimate 20 wax transfer printer in 1987. I had an Atari 520ST at the time and, as I recall, the image was one of several GIFs included on the Compute!’s Atari ST magazine’s bundled floppy, along with a GIF viewer. CompuServe rolled out the initial GIF specification (GIF87a) in 1987, and the magazine had a feature on this new format, I believe.
Thanks to the severity of my geekness at the time, I cherished the amazing color (!!!) Okimate 20 printouts and took to placing them in a scrapbook / photo album. Have a look for yourself. This is why, after 26 years, the printout looks brand new. (The passage of time can’t be blamed for the quality, here…)
I recently found this photo album tucked away on a shelf in the basement and thought a few folks out there might enjoy my tale.
Also, GIF is pronounced with a soft “g” — “jif.” I was there.
Awesome, Blake. It’s amazing you were making color printouts in 1987 — very rare. Those printouts may be the last surviving (or easily located) examples of some of those images. So you should probably scan all your printouts. I know I’d love to see them.
Thanks, Benj. Actually, I did my first color prints using a different Okimate 20 on my Amiga 1000. After that, later in ’86, I moved to an Apple IIe (odd move, yes) and an ImageWriter printer and did color printing using a package that had a chameleon as a logo (I forget the name) and came with several single-colour ribbons. The user had to swap ribbons after a print pass, and the printer would then rewind the paper and print over the image again with the next ribbon, and so on.
After the Atari 520ST I moved to an Apple IIgs (’87) and had an ImageWriter II color printer, and I have a page or two from that also in that photo album.
I’ll scan.
It’d be interesting to see if those GIF images still exist somewhere on the internet, or whether they have been lost permanently to the passage of time…
Perhaps someone still has that bundled disk from Compute!