{"id":931,"date":"2012-12-24T06:00:15","date_gmt":"2012-12-24T11:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=931"},"modified":"2012-12-29T14:04:30","modified_gmt":"2012-12-29T19:04:30","slug":"retro-gif-of-the-week-coca-cola","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/931\/retro-gif-of-the-week-coca-cola","title":{"rendered":"[ Retro GIF of the Week ]<\/span> Coca-Cola Classic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Coca-Cola<\/a>Click to see other views of this image:
[ Original Size<\/a> ] [ 2X Zoom<\/a> ]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In the BBS world of the late 1980s and early 1990s, one could easily find digital art that celebrated consumer brands, like the image of a Coke can seen here. In fact, I’d say brand art was a particularly distinctive genre of early computer art.<\/p>\n

If I had to explain why brand art was so common, I’d first speculate that when people needed something to test out their imaging equipment with — say, a new scanner or a video digitizer card — an advertisement or product package was always at hand to be a guinea pig.<\/p>\n

More importantly, consumer brands also inspire loyalty that consumers identify with personally. Think Doritos and Mountain Dew. Fans of those products like to spread their love of them as a cultural identifier, and the same was true in the 1980s and 1990s online space.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Image Origins<\/h3>\n

Now the real fun begins. Where did this image come from? I got it from an image compilation CD from the BBS era. Is appears to be a scanned promotional product photo of a Coca-Cola Classic can (remember that “Classic” distinguished from “Coke” in the New Coke<\/a> era.) Coca-Cola company likely created the photo itself, and a fan of Coca-Cola scanned it.<\/p>\n

Considering the image’s irregular size (227 x 425) when pared with its 8-bit color depth \/ 16 million color palette, and its file date of 1989, I’m going to guess strongly that this image originated on a Macintosh. Probably a Macintosh II family machine that could display 8-bit color with ease at high resolutions (640×480 was the most common).<\/p>\n

Why a Mac in particular? Well, its irregular size (i.e. it’s not at a system resolution of say 320×200) means that it was likely composed in a windowed operating environment like Mac OS. Also, alternative platforms were not commonly capable of that color depth and palette size in 1989.<\/p>\n

Windows was in a very primitive state at the time — it was on version 2.11<\/a> by late 1989, and Windows 2.11 was simply not flexible enough to be seriously used as a desktop publishing or graphic manipulation platform. Not only from its architecture but from a notable lack of applications for Windows during that period (note that Adobe Photoshop didn’t come to Windows until 1992).<\/p>\n

Also, very few IBM PC compatible computers supported 8-bit color at resolutions higher than 320×200 (courtesy of VGA) in 1989. In the Mac world, however, which hosted many graphic design professionals, such hardware (while expensive) was much more common.<\/p>\n

[ Wondering what a GIF is? Read the introduction to this column<\/a>. ]<\/em><\/small><\/center><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Retro GIF of the Week Fact Box<\/strong><\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Source File Name:<\/font><\/strong><\/small><\/td>\ncoke.gif<\/font><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Source File Date:<\/font><\/strong><\/small><\/td>\nJuly 29, 1989<\/font><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Source File Format:<\/font><\/strong><\/small><\/td>\nGIF – 87a (non-interlaced)<\/font><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Dimensions:<\/font><\/strong><\/small><\/td>\n227 x 425 pixels<\/font><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Color Depth
(bits per pixel):<\/font><\/strong><\/small><\/td>\n		8-bit (256 color)<\/font><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Color Resolution
(palette size):<\/font><\/strong><\/small><\/td>\n		24-bit (16,777,216 colors)<\/font><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Origin Platform:<\/font><\/strong><\/small><\/td>\nLikely Apple Macintosh<\/font><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Derived From:<\/font><\/strong><\/small><\/td>\nUnknown<\/font><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Creation Date:<\/font><\/strong><\/small><\/td>\nLate 1980s<\/font><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Artist:<\/font><\/strong><\/small><\/td>\nUnknown<\/font><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\nIf you know more about the origin of this image, please leave a comment.<\/font><\/small>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click to see other views of this image:[ Original Size ] [ 2X Zoom ] In the BBS world of the late 1980s and early 1990s, one could easily find digital art that celebrated consumer brands, like the image of a Coke can seen here. In fact, I’d say brand art was a particularly distinctive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,27,47,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-computer-info-and-history","category-regular_features","category-retro-gif-of-the-week","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}