Previously Unknown Warhol Works Recovered From '80s Amiga Disks 171
First time accepted submitter mooterSkooter (1132489) writes "Magnetic Imaging tools were used to recover a dozen images produced by Andy Warhol on his Amiga computer. I would've just stuck the disks in and tried to copy it myself."
Read more about it from the Frank Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry, which says "The impetus for the investigation came when [artist Cory] Arcangel, a self-described “Warhol fanatic and lifelong computer nerd,” learned about Warhol’s Amiga experiments from the YouTube video of the 1985 Commodore Amiga product launch. Acting on a hunch, and with the support of CMOA curator Tina Kukielski, Arcangel approached the AWM in December 2011 regarding the possibility of restoring the Amiga hardware in the museum’s possession, and cataloging any files on its associated diskettes. In April 2012, he contacted Golan Levin, a CMU art professor and director of the FRSCI, a laboratory that supports “atypical, anti-disciplinary and inter-institutional” arts research. Offering a grant to support the investigation, Levin connected Cory with the CMU Computer Club, a student organization that had gained renown for its expertise in “retrocomputing,” or the restoration of vintage computers."
Amiga Floppies (Score:5, Insightful)
They could have just used the disk drive. 99% of my Amiga floppies still work just fine.
The Amiga 1000 was a surprisingly durable machine, and frankly, Commodore, despite anything you could say about them making "toy" computers at a target price used very high quality components.
A modern PC's power supply will burn out long before a 25-yr old Commodore power supply will.
Re:Amiga Floppies (Score:4, Insightful)
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You apparently never had to put your C64 power supply in the refrigerator.
I've heard of drilling through the potting material to remove and replace a fuse buried in there, but never that. What was the hope behind the refrigeration of the "brick"?
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We just put a fan on ours, and it stayed up. But yeah, the power supply was the only thing Commodore hardware I ever heard of problems with.
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I've heard of drilling through the potting material to remove and replace a fuse buried in there, but never that. What was the hope behind the refrigeration of the "brick"?
Yes, the C64 power supply was potted -- and after digging through it what had to be replaced wasn't a fuse, it was a 5v linear regulator. The problem with the C64 power supply was that the Linear regulator was designed for 1A, but Commodore was using it to pass 1.2A. This shortened the life of the part, and when it failed it required a huge effort to dig through it to find the part that was bad and replace it.
But I did exactly that. And unfortunately one generally had to do that if they wanted to end up
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Same here. A bigger regulator with a proper heat sink solved the problem for good. It didn't help that the original heatsink was embedded in the epoxy.
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You apparently never had to put your C64 power supply in the refrigerator.
The C64 power supply used a 5v linear regulator rated for 0.2A - 0.3A less current than the C64 itself drew through it, so the part would have premature failure because it was underrated. Apparently/supposedly the difference was expected to be dumped as heat, and the supply was potted which made it very difficult to get to the part that failed and replace it... but doing so was necessary because the replacement supplies had the same design flaw. I did that replacement and after doing so the power supply l
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By the Amiga 500 they'd improved. All I had to do was put a rubber hot water bottle (filled with cold water) on the power supply to act as a heat sink.
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Supportable or unique is not a false dichotomy.
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Exactly what I thought. I would have just tried the disk in an Amiga with a HD attached, made an image and copied that over to try out in an emulator. Magnetic Imaging devices indeed! Well, makes for a more interesting story I suppose.
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Those are rare though and hard to find, probably full of dust, and not the sort of thing you want to stick a valuable floppy disk in. (those artists who examine Warhol's work are very careful and treat it all like something amazingly precious, even his old underwear, which I am not making up)
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If the data is irreplaceable and potentially valuable, magnetic imaging is safer than running the disk through an old drive. So, retrieve MY doodles using an old drive, use imaging for Warhol's.
Re:Amiga Floppies (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope your not an archeologist or forensics expert. The first thing to be concerned about, when dealing with a one-of-a-kind artifact, is to minimize any POSSIBLE (not probable) damage. There is a non-zero probability that using a disk drive could cause damage. There is less of a possibility that magnetic imaging would cause damage.
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Also, if they did much research, they might have found that one of the few remaining Amiga hardware peripheral producers has for some time sold floppy disk controllers that I understand are popular with Forensics people, as they can read a very wide variety of formats on a standard PC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org]
http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Catw... [icomp.de]
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ALL computers in the 80s were built like that. To this day, I still have an IBM keyboard from the early 80s that I'm pretty sure I could hammer nails with.
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Of course you could still hammer nails with it, but can you plug it in and *type* on it?
I used to know people who would carefully disassemble their old IBM keyboards, run the parts through a dishwasher and reassemble them, fully functional.
These days, I'm not sure if some keyboards could stand up to the compressed air in a can cleaning.
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Of course you could still hammer nails with it, but can you plug it in and *type* on it?
If it's one of the classic Model "M"s, you could type by hammering nails with it, if you're skilled enough to strike the nailhead with the specific keys you want.
Nowadays. Feh. I have given up on decent keyboards. I will settle for less violently sucky ones. And have to look pretty far afield to fine one.
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Control is SUPPOSED to be where the capslock is now, it was the universal standard! The idiot that changed the position is still in hiding in the witness protection program!
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99% of the Amiga floppies I still have work fine, but back in the day, I had to throw away 99% of my floppies quite early because of read/write errors.
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Proof-positive that Darwin was right. Natural selection yielded a subset of the species with strong survival characteristics, while winnowing out the weak.
Yeah, even today, I'm terribly surprised and disappointed if any of my Amiga floppies fail while I'm reading them. I suppose I should hurry up and copy them onto a hard drive as image files before something I care about dies.
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Nonsense. Back in the early 90's I sold consumer electronics for a living, and we did a brisk business in aftermarket and grey market power supplies for various Commodore machines - because the stock power supplies burned out with depressing regularity and stock replacements were expensive and difficult-to-impossible to obtain from official sources.
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Two problems, first they didn't want to damage the disks, and second the .pic format is pretty rare (and not well supported even in early Amiga days).
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Ditto, by playing around with the parallel port. There were no buffer ICs on the old Amigas to stop bad things happening to the main processor or coprocessors when there were shorts on the external I/O pins.
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Plastic "art" (Score:5, Insightful)
The Amiga and its demo scene were more art than Warhol ever will be.
His commentary on crass commercialism basically became crass commercialism itself. Why shouldn't it? It was the same basic idea.
As a wise man once said, "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
Re:Plastic "art" (Score:4, Insightful)
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You could remove the word 'computer' form that post and it would be just as true.
But a Warhol is valuable, Art is in the eye of the beholder. Some people apparently think giant soup cans are works of genius. No accounting for taste.
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Art is in the eye of the beholder.
False. It's hilarious reading all these comments from people who think they know about something they are completely ignorant about.
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You can start with the dictionary.
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Pretty much.
There is a reason Warhol decided not to release those images. Saying that this is something other than just a bit of fooling around to learn the tool is an insult.
While not the same situation this reminds me of people trying to analyze literature. If the writer would have intended for you to interpret the text differently he would have rephrased it. To say that the text needs interpretation is equivalent to claiming that the writer was too incompetent to get his message across.
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Do you have any idea how many scholars and academics earn their living writing literature and creating works of art for the sole purpose of having other scholars and academics review, critique, and interpret their work, all while getting paid to sell textbooks that they write, and paid to tell students how important those works are to read and study?
By pointing out the lunacy of this system you are endangering an entire sub-culture and way of life. They could have you burned at the stake as a heretic.
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I think you'd appreciate them a little more if you were old enough to remember just how limited the graphics software of the time was.
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A lot of these are from later models, with 24 bit support and higher resolutions. The original Amiga supported only a 64 colour palette from a total 4096 colours, and an additional feature where you could modify the palette part way through scanning to get smooth gradients, but techniques for exploiting this would not have been refined at the time of launch of the Amiga 1000.
Demos that used the Ham modes only did it for static pictures, all the moving parts (which was usually why you watched demos, other then to listen to the music) was done in the normal Amiga modes. So that was usually 32 (OCS) colors to 256 (AGA).
While there can be exceptions, that is generally how the Amiga Demo's are. They were also about pushing the hardware past it's limitations, so if you know of any demos that do higher then 256 colors, let me know so I can check them out.
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. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
*suppresses urge to make "In Soviet Russia" joke*.
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...the campbell soup can (one hit wonder)...
My God, so much outspoken ignorance from people who can't even be bothered to look at a wikipedia article. [wikipedia.org]
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Warhol was mostly marketing, like Kim Kardashian with a paint brush.
But you challenged us to read, so from Wikipedia:
"New York's Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on pop art in December 1962 during which artists like Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol's open embrace of market culture."
"In 1979, reviewers disliked his exhibits of portraits of 1970s personalities and celebrities, calling them superficial, facile and commercial, with no depth or in
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Critics that were contemporaries with the likes of Manet, Van Gogh, and Gaugan were similarly shunned by the establishment. Meanwhile, paintings that hung in galleries and were critically praised at the time are worthless today.
If it evokes an emotional reaction, even if that reaction is contempt, it's art. The worst insult you can hurl at a painter is "gee, that's pretty."
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His commentary on crass commercialism basically became crass commercialism itself. Why shouldn't it? It was the same basic idea.
Whooooooooooooooosh.
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The Amiga and its demo scene were more art than Warhol ever will be.
So, you hold a PhD in art history? Or have you ever taken a single entry level art history class?
The first question was sarcasm. I did, in fact, take an art history class in college. Your uneducated opinion of art is as bad as an art historian's knowledge of quantum physics, which is somewhere between "very little" and "absolutely none".
A man once said "Be silent and thought a fool. Speak and remove all doubt."
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Warhol's 'art' isn't old enough to have passed the test of time.
Art history records many examples of things that were art at the time but are now recognized as junk. Art history is not the same subject as art. It actually includes looking at trends that are stupid in hindsight. Like pop art and photo real paintings.
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Art history records many examples of things that were art at the time but are now recognized as junk.
Entirely true. Van Gogh was a failure who couldn't sell paintings. Gaugan and Manet were panned by contemporary critics, while the works that were critically praised and hung in expensive galleries are worthless today.
Warhol has been dead for a quarter of a century. Maybe enough time has passed, maybe not. But these guys who have never had an art history class who think they know what art is are ludicrous.
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In a subject that is not my field, I have little choice but to listen to those who have studied in the field.
Re:Plastic "art" (Score:4, Informative)
Your uneducated opinion of art is as bad as an art historian's knowledge of quantum physics, which is somewhere between "very little" and "absolutely none".
Except for the tiny fact that art is wholly subjective and quantum physics is wholly objective, sure.
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Art is man-made and its scholars fully understand it. That's not the case with quantum physics, yet at least.
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Are we talking about "fully understanding" the *history* of the piece of art, or the artwork itself? Because I can know who painted something, what materials they used, where and when they painted it, but still know nothing about the meaning of the art.
Plus, if you just *ask* the creator what his art means, maybe they'll tell you. In which case, how can we really be said to be "studying" anything? If we had an oracle that just told us how quantum physics works, we wouldn't really need to study that either.
B
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Are we talking about "fully understanding" the *history* of the piece of art, or the artwork itself?
The artwork itself. The composition, use of color, symbolism, etc. The history only points to where a work stands in relation to works before, contemporary, and afterword.
It was an interesting class. Not very useful, but interesting.
Editorializing (Score:5, Insightful)
I would've just stuck the disks in and tried to copy it myself.
Possibly that's because you're an idiot. Floppies and drives degrade just like everything else and taking these extraordinary measures gives a better chance of not permanently damaging something priceless during recovery attempts.
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Oh, you met the Amiga's DiskDoctor too, I see :)
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Heh, no. I was never a Miggie user back in the day, I've just got much experience with PC floppies and Murphy.
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DiskDoctor was supposed to be an fsck type of thing on the Amiga, only it was unreliable and buggy. That was one great thing about Amiga was that the community created all these great tool that were better than the official or default utilities. The OS kernel was great, but it had some not quite ready commercial programs that went with it and some last minute addons. Still, even the crappy stuff was much better than on the PC.
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That is a very real possibility. However, every single random miggy floppy disk I've ever tried, even after 20 years has worked perfectly.
I do see the point though - somebody probably thought they could make some mega-bucks from the ultra-rare Worhol images.
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I've recently read a number of floppies that are older than the ones in the TFA, and none of them have magically fallen apart.
Technically reading a disk will put some wear on it because the heads touch the surface, but if the disk was properly stored and was of a good brand (not Wabash), that wear is negligible.
Most serious software archivists would simply plop the disks in a floppy drive connected to a Kryoflux, or similar device, and be done with it.
Magnetic imaging is an overkill unless the disk is from
Re:Editorializing (Score:5, Insightful)
but if the disk was properly stored and was of a good brand
If.
This is pretty typical of Slashdot, really: technical people with some education second-guessing people who do $THING for a living even though they don't have the same knowledge of the field or the circumstances, but by $DEITY they're smart people and they know things, so they're instantly armchair experts.
Re:Editorializing (Score:4, Insightful)
If.
This is pretty typical of Slashdot, really: technical people with some education second-guessing people who do $THING for a living even though they don't have the same knowledge of the field or the circumstances, but by $DEITY they're smart people and they know things, so they're instantly armchair experts.
This isn't limited to the technical community. Doctors are pretty bad about this too. Particularly in regard to the field of finance: some of them should practically hang out a "Scam Me" sign. I'm sure there are "Modern Major Generals" in almost any field who feel -- incorrectly -- their own expertise and success in one field should make equally competent in anything.
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> Then you'd miss stuff like 1-2-3 diskettes and unformatted blocks.
And that is why, like I said, you attach your floppy drive to a Kryoflux, SuperCard Pro, or Deluxe Option Board device.
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Mod parent up. TFA made it sound like they did raw complex magnetic imaging similar to that Cray disk that was recovered while back.
Compared to that, using a Kryoflux is little more than "throwing it in a floppy drive".
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Do any of your random old floppies hold the only known copies of works by a major dead artist? Wanker.
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Was Warhol's dirty TP also art? As much as some image he played with draw circle, flood fill on. Bonus; No 'which is the original' issues on the TP.
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Was Warhol's dirty TP also art?
It could be, according to this guy [wikipedia.org]
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Of course a 3.5" floppy drive can damage a disk. The head is in contact with moving media. Should it damage the disk? No. CAN it damage the disk? Certainly.
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Right? What happens if a neckbeard's dandruff flake gets into the drive and thence between the read head and the magnetic disc?
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You also need an Amiga floppy drive (or anything that can be directly controllable which excludes PC floppy drives).
That's (Score:2)
Souper
Digital Archaeology (Score:2)
Digital Archaeology, whoda thunk it?
My name is Andy Warhol (Score:3)
and I just learned to use flood-fill.
Editors please do your job (Score:5, Informative)
CMOA? AWM? CMU? FRSCI? Identifying what an acronym stands for is very helpful when the acronym isn't very well known. Yes I know I can read the article and try to find it out, but it's helpful for summaries too.
In case anyone else was wondering:
CMOA - Carnegie Museum of Art
AWM - Andy Warhol Museum
CMU - Carnegie Mellon University
FRSCI - Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
What not to do (Score:5, Insightful)
You've just found an undiscovered work by Andy Warhol. Do you want to:
1. Wipe it down with Pledge(TM)?
2. Call an appropriate professional for advice?
Because I'm pretty sure that . . . "I would've just stuck the disks in and tried to copy it myself" . . . is the physical artifact equivalent of using some randomly chosen household cleaner. And museum curators are pretty anal about curation of their stuff.
Also, for the love of God, do not use "DiskDoctor"!
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DiskDoctor practices medicine from a throne of lies.
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Let me see... I last used a floppy a couple years ago and it was basically single-use: wrote data to it once, got it back off once, then Bad Sector City. Most of that 10-pack of floppies was the same way.
Granted "modern" 3.5" floppies are much lower quality than what we had in the '80s but your assertion that floppies never break is stupid.
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Do your archives contain anything of consequence? These are the only known copies of works by a major dead artist, they're worth taking extra precautions over that your old 16-color horse porn doesn't
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I had a failing drive that would eat disks.
The thing about being anal retentive about preserving the data is that you don't want to be the jerk who ruined a priceless warhol artifact by having an incredibly unlucky day.
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But if it works then you've proven you're smarter than everyone else, and that's obviously more important.
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There's something inherently so deeply Warhol about doing just that.
Andy Warhol (Score:2)
Andy used to hang around the SVA (School of Visual Arts) cafeteria trying to pick up (male) students.
I was in the film school at the time, so I didn't give a crap about who he was. There was another guy as well back then, Larry Gartel, who also used the Amiga to create digital art. He's obviously not as well known as Warhol, but thems the breaks.
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Peter Max (60's psychedelic artist) used an Amiga on Missing Persons' "Surrender Your Heart" video, which at the time I thought was pretty darn cool. Plus, you know, Dale Bozzio...
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Peter Max (60's psychedelic artist) used an Amiga on Missing Persons' "Surrender Your Heart" video, which at the time I thought was pretty darn cool. Plus, you know, Dale Bozzio...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
shouldve called me (Score:2)
i have a mint amiga 600!
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i have a mint amiga 600!
Poser! They never made the Amiga in any color than dead-fish beige! (Except for the CDTV and CD32, which were "A/V component charcoal".)
Hell, does any computer come in a primary color, other than overaggressive "compensating for something" red on certain gaming-grade systems?
And yes, I'm joking, and I know you don't mean color when you say "mint".
I'm just trying to forestall the inevitable "whoosh" here. Even if it kills the joke.
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Mint was the flavor of the computer you berk!
Reverse engineer the format??? (Score:5, Informative)
Odds are very high that they where IFF. Commodore created a universal documented format container called IFF back in the day. The Graphics version was completely documented and is evens still supported by a lot of graphics programs.
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It was said in the BBC article emulators couldn't load it, and considering GIMP loads IFF, and he had a pre-release Amiga 1000 with unreleased software, it's entirely possible it was from before the Interchange File Format was standardized.
Sure enough, turns out to be the case, paraphrased from the PDF linked above, An older format deprecated by 1990 was called PLBM (PLanar BitMap, compared to the ILBM interleaved bitmaps you might recall as typical IFF). This format is much more poorly (sic) documented.
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"According to that document, they were only loadable with a pre-release Kickstart found on one of the disks (the Amiga 1000 booted an early BIOS from ROM and then loaded the Kickstart from disk). Evidently they changed the format before the commercial release."
That makes no sense at all. The OS did not have a picture viewer or OS calls to load images from disk. Kickstart was basically just the ROM part of the OS. When launched AmigaOS was not stable enough to put in rom so Commodore stuck in a writeable con
Well, there goes ... (Score:4, Funny)
Congrats (Score:2)
I've had the pleasure of working with the CMU CC for the past several years, broadcasting their Demoparty, Demosplash, on Scenesat the past several years. These guys are seriously passionate about retrocomputing and The Demoscene. They have released some neat Demos for the Apple Lisa and the Vectrex. Good to see them getting some recognition here. They're nice bunch of guys, and the Warhol museum certainly picked the right people for the job, right in Pittsburgh.
If you're in the Retro computers and the Amig
uh..really? (Score:2)
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media... [bbcimg.co.uk]
That Venus is not the work of Andy Warhol if I remember correctly. (Well, he might have done the HAM-fisted cut and paste of the third eye in the middle of her forehead..)
I remember seeing it on the cover of one of the Amiga magazines as the full reproduction. I realize that Warhol stole most of what he did from other artists, but surely this has to be a joke.
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http://amiga.filfre.net/wp-con... [filfre.net]
There's the original. I was wrong, it wasn't a full reproduction - but it was a Deluxe Paint marketing image for sure.
Are you sure? (Score:2)
When you only have 16 colors, everything looks like a Warhol work.
Wow, that was a lot of trouble to go through... (Score:2)
Re:1985 (Score:4, Funny)
They introduced a new feature in 2015 that allows broadcasts to be sent back in time.
However, due to a lightning strike, it got stuck on 1885 after sending only a few videos back to 1955.
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I was reading about the new Google Time Machine... I thought that was for Street View and not Youtube.
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from the YouTube video of the 1985 Commodore Amiga product launch
I didn't know YouTube was around in 1985
It wasn't. That is why it says "from the YouTube video of the 1985 Commodore Amiga product launch" and not "from the 1985 YouTube video of the Commodore Amiga product launch"
Re:1985 (Score:5, Funny)
That long ago? It was probably called YeTube.