the Tandy 2000 and GIFs

[John Foust]

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:04:08 -0700 (PDT), Chris M wrote:
>The only graphics package (besides Autocad)
>that was graphics oriented was Lumena, and that was so
>old I sincerely doubt gifs were around then.

GIF was developed by Compuserve in 1987, although at that
point they were also pushing RLE images.  Yes, Lumena predates 
that by at least four years.

AutoCAD is vector oriented, not pixel-oriented, although at 
some point Autodesk may have introduced a tool that rasterized 
a vector drawing and exported it as GIF.

At 06:31 PM 3/11/2007, Bob Bradlee wrote:
>Compuserve had a gif viewer editor for just about everything that could display graphics.
>What ever happened to tha old compuserve GIF utilities.

Same as all the rest of the interesting files at Compuserve:
protected into oblivion when they were steamrolled by the Web.

I wonder if they bothered to keep backup tapes of all the
forum discussions and file collections.  That would be 
endlessly fascinating for historical purposes...  millions 
of posts going back to the early 80s...  Maybe a few will
turn up some day.

- John