GIFs Galore CDROM

History – What is GIFs Galore CDROM?

The object is a copy of a CD-ROM, preserved on the Internet Archive (see figure 1), containing roughly 6.000 GIF images from the earliest days of the file format. It was uploaded and catalogued in 2010 by Laura Milvy, an assistant at the non-profit organization. The CD-ROM itself was created in 1992 by now-defunct Walnut Creek CDROM Inc., a small Californian company that produced and sold collections of free software. During the 1990s, Walnut Creek was also instrumental in sponsoring and distributing the FreeBSD operating system as well as »mods« for the popular DOOM game engine through its CD-ROM sand FTP servers.

The image files on GIFs Galore CDROM are of a wide variety, organized into subdirectories and classified by categories ranging from »ABSTRACT«, »CARS«, and »FROGS« to »MOVIE«, »SWIMSUIT«, and »VIETNAM«. They were probably collected in 1992 by Walnut Creek from a number of sources: forums on Compuserve’s proprietary online service (for which the GIF file format was invented), FTP servers, and Bulletin Board Systems. Remember that at the time the World Wide Web was still in its infancy, totalling no more than 100 websites. No further information on the images is given on GIFs Galore CDROM so for most we do not know the artist/author, platform, context or exact date of creation.

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Competencies – What can GIFs Galore CDROM do?

GIFs Galore CDROM can be accessed through the Internet Archive website either as a browsable replica of the disc’s original file structure and data (see figure 2) or downloaded as a single disk image file in the ISO 9660 format. This image file, in turn, can be mounted by the local operating system, burned on a recordable CD-R to recreate the original CD-ROM as a physical medium or even read by a virtual optical disk drive.

Most physical copies of the Walnut Creek CD-ROM from 1992 have probably been lost or destroyed by now. Compuserve’s proprietary online service underwent several changes in technology and ownership and was finally discontinued in 2017. The vast majority of Bulletin Board Systems had already been shut down at the end of the 1990s. And, as mentioned above, the WWW was hardly more than an academic experiment in 1992. As a consequence, disk image files of CD-ROMs like GIFs Galore CDROM are among the only media objects to store GIF image files from around 1990.

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Findings – What does GIFs Galore CDROM show?

GIFs Galore CDROM preserves a small but important piece of our digital cultural heritage. It constitutes one of the few remaining collections of GIF files from before the rise of the WWW. As such, it offers a unique glimpse into the earliest days of the Graphics InterchangeFormat (the full name of the specification). GIFs Galore CDROM documents that the file format was used around 1990, just as its designers at Compuserve had intended, for all kinds of digital images – from low-resolution scans to diagrams to pictograms to screen captures to bitmap art to rendered computer graphics to high-quality reproductions of photographs (see figure 3).

Contrary to popular belief and conventional histories of the GIF, the format has a rich record that precedes the WWW. It was the first true universal standard for images in computer networks of the late 1980s and early 1990s. GIFsGalore CDROM belies catchy but simplistic tales of »GIF 1.0« and »GIF 2.0«, which sketch a linear technical and aesthetic progression from crude web graphics to animated GIFs on social media. It is a testament to the multiplicity and the pecularities of visual culture in emerging online communities around 1990. The virtual object of the CD-ROM disk image is an invaluable resource for the digital historian of that age.

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_{Illustrations}

_{Figure 1: GIFs Galore CDROM (1992), Internet Archive (screen capture)}

_{Figure 2: Directory structure of GIFs Galore CDROM (1992), Internet Archive (screen capture)}

_{Figure 3: ./GIF/NATURE/LIGHTHOS.GIF, GIFs Galore CDROM (1992)}

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_{Further reading}

_{Driscoll, Kevin: The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 2022.}

_{Eppink, Jason: »A Brief History of the GIF (so Far)«, Journal of Visual Culture (13/3)2014: 298–306.}

_{Strauven, Wanda: »Let’s Dance: GIF 1.0 versus GIF 2.0«, in: Marek Jancovic, Axel Volmarand, Alexandra Schneider (eds.): Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures, Lüneburg: Meson Press 2019, pp. 47–63.}

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Das Virtuelle Objekt des Monats

Seit April 2023 stellen wir jeden Monat ein »Virtuelles Objekt des Monats« (VOM) auf der Website des Sonderforschungsbereichs 1567 »Virtuelle Lebenswelten« vor. Die präsentierten Objekte entstammen der Forschung in den Teilprojekten. Im Zusammenspiel von Text und Animation, desktop- oder smartphonebasierter Augmentierung oder anderer grafischer Aufbereitungen eröffnen wir Einblicke in die verschiedenen Forschungsthemen und den Arbeitsalltag des SFB. Das VOM macht unsere Wissensproduktion transparent. Zugleich wollen wir hier mit den Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Wissensvermittlung in und durch Virtualität und Visualität experimentieren.

Das »Virtuelle Objektdes Monats« ist mehr als ein populärwissenschaftlicher Text und mehr als ein illustrierendes Bild. Die Autor*innen des jeweiligen VOM präsentieren kurz einen Gegenstand ihrer Forschung um daran ein Argument scharfzustellen. Dabei werden die Objekte auf ihren Mehrwert hin befragt, den sie in dem jeweiligen Forschungssetting preisgeben. Mit dem Text skizzieren unsere Wissenschaftler*innen das Bemerkenswerte, das Eigentümliche oder auch das Einzigartige, welches das jeweilige Objekt zeigt. Sie machen so die Forschung des SFB in einem kurzweiligen Schlaglicht sichtbar. Die zum VOM gehörende Visualisierung ist eine weitere Transformation des Forschungsgegenstands, die das Argument noch einmal auf eine andere Art und Weise zugänglich macht.