the print shop robot returns!

(8 comments)
2005.10.08
Animated Clipart of the Moment
When I was in elementary school, there was a kind of nifty program called "Print Shop" for Apple II and maybe C=64...for a long time in the 1980s you could see its distinctive one-sheet signs and longer banners around at schools and small stores.

It came with a supply of clipart...I remember there were two robots, a kind of corny clunky one, and this one, which I was a bit infatuated with:

It was pretty cool by early-80s standards...I put out a call on AtariAge.com, and a guy was able to dig up the old files for me. It also came with some newer clipart files, including this one with cute little tanks, and then some spaceship imagery, and of course "I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul" which in this case involved turning them into little animated GIFs:

and


These can both be tiled as follows:











(Of course, these aren't terribly original even by my own standards; if you like these check out these brilliant tiling microcosms of kinetic mayhem or my own Alien Bill Horde and/or the Etch-A-Sketch Wing of Small Gif Cinema.)