Apple II animated GIF


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There are many efforts being made to capture the design and aesthetic of early modern computers. The Vanamo Online Game Museum produces high-resolution, public-domain photos of vintage hardware; Charles Mangin creates 3D-printed miniature replicas; and Steve Weyhrich adapted the Apple II into a Minecraft structure.

All these facsimiles are, for the most part, static: once produced, they don’t move or change. James Ball pursued a more dynamic form of art with his recent online exhibit, "I am a computer". His medium of choice: the GIF.

Like Vanamo, Mangin, and Weyhrich, Ball began with a physical models by photographing sixteen computers at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. He then adapted those photos into his own stylized, animated art.

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Wrote Ball:

‘I am a computer’ celebrates the visual character of desktop computing machines from a colourless period in industrial design.

From word processors and video terminals, to the very first desktop personal computers, these compact machines heralded a beige age, a period of microcomputing from the the 1970s and early 80s when design standards had conformed to realise a palette of neutral coloured machines throughout offices and later the home.

Any new way to depict an old computer is a welcome one. My thanks to Ball for including the Apple II in his gallery!

(Hat tip to Matthew Gault)

  1. Jonathan Badger says:

    Yes, a “beige age” indeed. I remember seeing a NeXT workstation in 1989/1990 and was amazed at least by the fact that it was all black as for the advanced operating system. It looked like how we imagined computers looked in cyberpunk novels and not like the beige boxes we used!