Notice: This historic context page contains some archaic Adult material.
For much of the DOS era, the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) file was the reigning king for still images. It was so popular in fact that when the Gopher Protocol was defined, they reserved one Item-Type just for GIF files, and another for lumping every other form of graphic. Hundreds of thousands of GIF files were created, much of it titillating and adult imagery (not unexpectedly, since that is what young computer geeks especially enjoyed secretly viewing and trading with their friends). GIF files also have the ability to display simple animations (e.g. a stored set of differing images presented sequentially), so of course some adult animated GIFs were also created.
GIF was patented software, and after it became popular the patent owner suddenly decided to begin charging software developers a license fee. As what usually happens in the personal computer world when a retroactive licence fee is greedily imposed on a protocol (such as happened with the Gopher retroactive licensing fiasco), the community immediately turned their backs. Even though it is a "lossy" format (like MP3 vs WAV), the Joint Planning Group (JPG) graphic protocol was embraced as the replacement, and the GIF protocol quickly faded away.
Design Tip: Cross-stich patterns found in old sewing books are an excellent resource when creating Icons and other graphics built-up from individual pixels.
With the arrival of 14" VGA color monitors, computer retailers needed something to display on the screen so consumers could make side-by-side monitor comparisons. These significant GIF and JPG image files below were ubiquitous known-picture-of-reference choices for Silicon Valley in-store Demos (so much so that they were even pasted on the screens of monitors advertised in computer shopper newspapers).
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