Images Paint reading rainbow

 

A much higher quality reading rainbow copy was uploaded recently, so the lion kingdom was caught up again in the paint program.  That has remaned an enigma since lions 1st saw it in 1983.  It was a 1 off program written in the New York Institute of Technology computer graphics lab.

Most of the hits for Images Paint System are a 1985 program for Amiga called Aegis Animator. Maybe it was derived from the 1983 program.  Then there's 1 hit for a siggraph presentation.

https://dac.siggraph.org/pioneers-digital-art/

After some heroic network capture scraping & transcoding, a live stream was on the hard drive.  Helas, it was more about the art & the artist rather than the tool or what it ran on.

 

At 47:00 she revealed the program only achieved animation by cycling the color palette, hence why the oars looked like they did.  There's a video of clearly palette based animation in realtime.

This one said it was marketed commercially, but still no screenshots.

The higher resolution reading rainbow footage showed a full screen text menu mode with a barely visible pointer over it.  It might have been a text cursor. 

The presenter selects "get brush" from 1 page of options.  This shows multiple pages of brush titles but no images of the brushes.  It looks like he started with brush "dot9 solid" selected & changed it to brush "cluster solid" from this screen.  

The next footage flips back to the graphics screen where he does a paint operation & then fills by similar color.  There's a choice between drawing patterns & solid colors.  There's a zoom function.  It's all the same as any modern program, but with a much simpler interface.  It shows how PC paint & Mac paint in the day were really incremental updates to previously devised tools.

Some enhancement shows the text menus were always on a VT100 in the back while the foreground monitor always showed graphics.  Both had to be accessed from the same tablet.  He actually said VT100 on a kid show.

Given all the fuss about replicating vintage programs lost to time, this might be a good one to replicate either on a C64 emulator to discover how close a C64 could have gotten or in javascript.  Lions wouldn't invest any more than javascript but the real discovery would be from replicating it on a C64.

The XOR triangle cursor would have been tricky on a C64.   Sprites didn't have XOR.  They only had transparency.  It would entail XORing the bitmap itself.

To get the palette overlay & zoom would have taken a double buffer.  There's a history menu option but no obvious undo.  He uses fill rather than undo to undo an operation.

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2026 update:

Just like that, the gootube video was memory holed like everything else.  The lion kingdom's copy still survived.

 Additional 1985 footage of Images paint came through the gootube recommender.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetEl4cRF60

 

https://archive.org/details/cglabcannes85

It underwent some improvements after 1983. 

 

 

 

 

 

The complete PDP-11 system was shown.  It retained the same XOR triangle cursor & VT100 brush menu.  Noted how places which were serious about scanning documents already had proper off axis lighting by 1985.

 There's a collection of bits about the NYIT.  

https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22nyit+computer+graphics+lab%22

 Nothing on the reading rainbow guy.

 

 A similar office to the reading rainbow guy.  They seemed to all have offices in a highrise with curtains over their windows.

 

Some photos of a hottie there.  Looks like the containment grid in Ghostbusters.  Looked like a swanky place.  Imagine living out your life there, in the time of Ghostbusters & Superman.  She probably moved to Long Island, had a bunch of kids, experienced the peak of the 90's boom, the millennial celebration on times square.

 

 

More bits about the NYIT. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Institute_of_Technology 

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/nyit/masson/nyit.html 

It seems all the magic happened in Old Westbury rather than the urban megaplex.  Places like this are in survival mode now & more like businesses than schools.

 

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Reviewing how Aegis animator worked, young lion could have had a kick ass line drawing animation program on the C64.  At minimum, it could have just interpolated (tweened) polygon vertices between keyframes.  At most, it could have supported objects, grouping, scale, rotate, mirror, perspective modifiers, all with their own keyframes on some kind of timeline.  That could have replaced all the pen & paper drawing lions did.  

 

While technically within the C64's limits, the concepts were just too far beyond young lion & the bitmap routines were definitely inaccessible to young lion.  An object oriented drawing program would definitely have been a noble cause & it could have been done in Logo.  Lions didn't discover object oriented line drawing until 1993.  Graphs of modifiers didn't come until the 2000's.  Even today it would be difficult to represent a graph that changed over time.

While Blender can do it all now, it has somehow managed to make line drawings impossibly hard.  That could be a rationale for making a simple line animation program today.

The mane reason for retro computing today is to discover if something was ever possible.

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The ankle was better today than any time since July.  Still a mild bone on bone pain when hitting the right angle.  That's never going away but there's hope it can be managed with polarized training.  As of late, the pain is greatest when starting & virtually gone after 9 miles.  For many months, it would grow with distance.  This was after 37 miles in 7 days.