There might not be anything exceedingly impressive about the picture to the right. But believe me, it once amazed me.It was a 256 color, 320 x 200 pixel .bmp file which took up the whole screen. I found the original intact on a historical backup CD. In order to post it here, I needed to convert the 64K file to .jpg format.
I first saw this colourful frog as a demo on a computer monitor in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia in February of 1988. I couldn't believe the stunning impact of the new VGA graphics cards. To me, the screen was just like looking at a photograph. I was almost speechless.
You see, prior to that time we were stuck with lowly IBM CGA cards. There were some Hercules cards with higher resolution but they were in boring monochrome.
Now, I see how photography has turned digital and how many images never even hit paper. I'm sure if I'd known that one day I would be saving my own images like this for viewing on a computer screen, I'd have openly wept.
