Graphics Day 2.Anyone remember the Commodore 64? 64 *kb* of RAM, that is!!! Whoa! My family had one, and for my 18th birthday - in early 1985 - my sister and her husband gave me a graphics programme for it, called Doodle!.
The 64's screen gave 320 by 200 pixels; there were 16 colours TOTAL to chose from. In spite of such limitations, Doodle! proved addictive. I once asked a friend to have his mathematician father calculate for me: what would be the total number of all possible configurations of only black and white pixels for this screen? The answer was relatively simple: Number of colours (2 in this case) raised to the power of the number of available pixels (200 x 320 = 64000). So, 2^64000 or, conveniently, 10^19264, a number which I have never forgotten. Considering that the estimated number of atoms in the universe is only 10^100 or so, this is an *unimaginably* vaster number than THAT.
Here are some of my Doodle! pieces from the late 1980s. All were printed on an early ribbon printer, then copied and actually screen printed (I was a screen printer at the end of the 1980s too). My fascination with science fiction is evident. The top picture (which features on the blog's right-hand column, a bit lower bit down) is the face of a rather frustrated alien upon finding himself on such a perplexing planet as ours.
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