Thank god for the Internet Archive. Without its efforts, entire treasure troves of data would be lost to linkrot, software obsolescence, and the sands of time. Like this gigantic cache of early computer graphics, originally published by Walnut Creek Software over 25 years ago on a CD-ROM.
It’s called GIFs Galore, and true to its name, it contains thousands and thousands of GIFs. Most of them aren’t animated, because this CD-ROM was published in August 1992, a month before the jpeg was even released, back when the GIF file format was still one of the better choices for a static image.
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I was tipped off to this wonderful find by Twitter user Taizou, who loved the GIFs so much he made a Twitter bot that delivers one of these magical images per hour. If you don’t have the patience to sort through such a huge download yourself, it’s a Motherboard-Recommended Follow (™).
The 600+ MB file is organized into subfolders that include “Star Trek,” “Fantasy,” “Sci_Fi,” and intriguingly, “Hunks.” It delivers. Here are some of my favorites:
This woman is tappin’ into some kind of matrix.
When you’re completely on top of your shit.
I told you there were hunks.
“Bart in flesh tone is weird.” —Emanuel Maiberg
Who is he???
Vaporwave as fuck.
So go. Get lost in the innocent, low-resolution computer world of 1992. Maybe put some Kraftwerk on. This is my gift to you.
