Clip art collections from the early 1990s are today’s forgotten cultural time capsules, freezing life three decades ago as digital illustrations full of obsolete tech, vintage fashions, and more. Just for fun, let’s explore computer art from a time just before the Internet hit it big.

[Benj’s note—I wrote this piece years ago, and it never saw the light of day until now. Hope you enjoy.]

The Origins of Clip Art

The concept of clip art originated in the pre-computer era, when graphics designers would browse printed collections of royalty-free illustrations to cut and paste into their compositions.

When desktop publishing came to personal computers in the mid-1980s, the need arose for digital artwork that people could paste into newsletters, banners, signs, and more. Illustrators created these artworks and publishers collected them onto volumes of floppy disks or on CD-ROM, and users would load them into applications such as WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and Aldus PageMaker.

Historically, artists created most clip art in a vector format, which means the images could be scaled to any size and not lose quality. That makes it extra fun today to take an image designed for very low resolution and scale it up to 3000 pixels wide to see details that you might otherwise miss.

I browsed through about a dozen early 1990s CD-ROM clip art collections found on the Internet Archive and Jason Scott’s CD archive and picked out a handful of examples of the artform that represent an unusual and rare peek into our digital past.

Obsolete Technology

Clip art collections from the early 1990s are full of obsolete technology, such as 35mm film, pagers, brick-like cell phones, typewriters, word processors, VHS tapes, huge answering machines, overhead projectors, film cameras, and much more. Browsing these images somehow makes you feel like a digital archeologist discovering the tools people used in the past (even if you lived through that time period yourself).

People and Offices

It’s funny to see graphical depictions of vintage computer tech in contemporary use. Here, a man and a woman in an office look at an unusually large CRT monitor next to a digitizer tablet (looks like a professional CAD setup). Behind the woman we see a beefy, double-wide workstation of some kind. And of course, the fashions are vintage as well. Just another slice of life courtesy of clip art.

Scrumptious Digital Food

Some clip art started out as scanned printed works that were then converted into black line-art vectors and colorized on the computer. Others (like the cheeseburger seen here) originated as native digital illustrations. This vintage food art has a distinctive aesthetic that hearkens back to a more delicious age. It’s not every day that a 30 year-old cheeseburger makes you hungry.

Vintage Computers

I ran across thousands of depictions of old computers from the 1980s and early 1990s in clip art collections, and each one is an amazing miniature work of art. It seemed like some artists wanted to cover every possible computer model. Here we see a clip art representation of an Atari Portfolio (of all things) on the left and the spitting image of a Laser 128, a popular Apple II clone released in 1984, on the right.

Cheesy Store Signs

Silly pre-made commercial signs rank among the most common items in some early digital clip art collections. Presumably, a small shop (in the age before retail monoculture) could print out their own signs to promote in-store sales or other events. Because who wouldn’t want Santa’s leftovers?

A Vintage Car Phone—and a Vintage Car

In the 1980s and early 1990s, some people on the more wealthy end of the spectrum used bulky “bag phone” cellular phones in their cars (And they considered them tiny and portable at the time). Here we see a handset for just such a cell phone rendered as clip art—and a vintage car that looks like a Cutlass Cierra to go with it.

Vintage Fashions

Not surprisingly, the people depicted in early 1990s clip art often wear early 1990s clothing. In some cases, you’ll find holdovers of 1980s fashions, likely because the illustrators sometimes traced images from older sources such as magazines or clothing catalogs right at the turn of the 1990s.

Old-Timey Computer Input Methods

Vintage computer peripherals abound in old clip art, including modems, printers, scanners, and more. But do you recognize these vintage input methods? Starting in the upper left going clockwise, we see a digitizer used to input coordinates into a CAD program, a handheld scanner similar to the Logitech Scanman, and a small serial trackball designed to clip onto the side of a keyboard.

Playing Video Games

Playing video games in the early 1990s looked exactly like this. Here we see two blocky robots facing off on a vintage CRT television while a kid uses what looks like a Spectravideo Quickshot XII joystick for the NES. What at first looks like a pile of colorful VHS tapes is in fact a NES control deck. Good times, all around.

And Finally, Vintage Boots

We end our time travel with a pair of suspiciously-1980s-looking boots. Does that mean some of this artwork is actually older than the early 1990s? Perhaps. Although Macs supported color as early as 1987 (for a very high price), colorful clip art wasn’t all that common until the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990. Either way, it’s likely the artist was drawing on fashions that didn’t seem that old at the time.

Seeing vintage clip-art scaled to modern high resolutions feels like pulling a slice of the past up to our future time, and these images are only 25-30 years old. If these artworks survive, imagine the delight of someone opening them up 200 years from now. The cheeseburger will still look delicious.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 15th, 2024 at 7:00 am and is filed under BBS History, Computer History, Internet History, Retrogaming, Vintage Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.