About the Media Bin

	Dinos These are some of the earliest images I've held onto over the years. Most are datestamped 4/13/1988, with a few others later in May of 1989. They were produced via an Electronic Crayon program, which were popular at the time. Any black pixels would remain static, but you could choose colors and fill in any of the gaps. Some of the duplicate images were made by my brother. I rescued these of 5.25" floppies in the mid-2000s.
	Harvard Graphics 3 Corel Draw and Harvard Graphics were the first few drawing programs I used, aside from Draw for DOS, which I had a few years earlier. These are from Fall 1991, with some of the stock ones from late 1990. I actually went to a conference for this release, and when the speaker announced that the previous drawing tools had been scrapped, the audience erupted into applause. It was traditionally a presentation tool, more geared for graphs and charts. I used it for clipart on school reports, and as a game for my brother. Since the graphics were vector lines, you could zoom without the art getting pixelated. I would hide a small bug in the deepest zoom levels, and have him try to find them.
	Paintbrush Most of these date back to very early 1991 through Fall 1992. While some were drawn from scratch in MS Paint, others were scans that later had some editing done in Paint. I recall saving some space on my Pentium 2 which only had a 200Mb hard drive at the time by saving many of them at JPGs since those ended up being smaller, but I had no idea that the format was lossy. I believe I re-found many of them on some 3.5" disks later.
	Disney Animation Studio Also in 1992, I got the Disney Animation Studio for my birthday. I think it cost some otherworldly amount, like $70, which was probably due to the licensing. It came with some genuine Disney animation samples, and then some tools like onion skinning, which allowed you to animate as well. I grew frustrated quickly since I couldn't figure out how to 'draw well', as if that was something that would be included. The files are saved in a .CFT format and played via command line. I've used Dosbox to capture the screen to an AVI. Then handbrake to convert them to .MP4. Finally in Photoshop, I opened those and trimmed them down so they could be exported as animated GIFs. I kept the DOS loader screens that were part of the batch file I wrote to play through them all. The top line also had some preceding comments.
	WordPerfect The content here ranges from 7th grade through my PHD. I modeled it after the WordPerfect program, which I used extensively until probably college. Regardless, I formatted the filenames to pre-Win95 standards and organzied the content onto different drives. D: contains my main school files. C: is for my brother's. E: is for my movie scripts and the like. A: and B: have some easter eggs. This is probably one of the pages here that really needs to be viewed on a desktop.
	Raytraced These were images saved off a BBS. My friend's brother was a few years older and would download them. We traded on floppies in the same way as shareware games. We tried to download the program to make our own, but it was way too abstract.
	Muzik Back before MP3's gave us a relatively good quality with a smaller filesize, MOD music was an acceptable alternative. It took the MIDI principle of just recording the notes, but rather than relying on the system's library of sounds, it included its own. This increased the filesize a bit, but was still manageable. Most tracks were electronic in nature, and some still sounded like MIDI, but a few really shine. These were pretty much all obtained off BBS's that my friend's brother used to access. I tried to recreate a player that would have been used to play them in DOS. They also went hand in hand with the Demoscene applications of the time.
	Comic Cards This seems like a random page, but it represents not only one of my main driving hobbies at the time, but also the first images that I downloaded of the fledgling World Wide Web. Prior to that I had some things off BBS connections, but my friend's brother mainly dealt with that. Each image usually took half of a day to download. The speed was slow and would often time-out. Theses are all pretty much from July 1995, but I found the first image was a little earlier. On 6/22/1995, I grabbed some random pages of the Gen-X comic:
	.GIF89a Once the Web started to take hold, it was only natural to collect animated .GIFs. I remember hearing about these from my friend, and wondered how much space they must take up. We were quite a while from any sort of proper video, and while these weren't even close, it was something. Pretty much everything here is from 1996-1998. Also if you're wondering why the page is called GIF89a, it's due to the two formats of GIF. GIF87 was an older one and didn't support transparency or animations like GIF89a. There was really no reason to use that anymore, but LView (the program I used to view and save images) had the choice, and you had to ensure it was the right one.
	Backgrnd There's not much to say about these. I once again saved a ton off the Web, and a fair amount of these did end up on some of my early pages. They were gaudy and bright, but that's how web 1.0 went. These are all from 1997. I think some of them were ripped from the WordPerfect graphic set.
	ASCII Art These all seemed to be text files saved between June-July 1996. Images still took a while to download so ASCII art was a fun way to create crude graphical representations without much load time.
	88x31 (Now) Buttons This is my archive from 1996-1997. While there are plenty more out there, I don't intend to update this page, as I'd rather keep it as a snapshot for the sites that were relavent at the time. A fair amount were on my original Home Page around that time, but I found the folder I kept them in, so I'll include the whole lot of them here. I've also added the original URL's as links, which probably won't go to any live site, but who knows!
	Coolpix Starting with the dawn of web browsing, I downloaded images that I found interesting. They ended up in folders called CoolPix. This roughly went from 1995 to 1998. Choose the link below to load each year. You can sort of see how some of my interests evolved over the years.
	Kodak DC200 Finally in 2000 or so, I got my first digital camera. It was a .9 megapixel camera and couldn't zoom. It also ate through AA batteries in minutes, so you might get about 10 pictures taken. Despite those flaws, I was able to get some early pictures of my room, yard, and various collectables. They're not bad for the time, and better than digitizing film, which was my only other option for the preceding few years.
	Render I've only tinkered around with 3D rendering (I guess we call it modeling now), starting with a bootlegged version of Lightwave in early 1999, and getting a little better throughout the mid-2000s. I even got some paying jobs doing dull technical animations.
	Java After the capabilities of HTML were exhausted (at the time) Java applets seemed to fill the void for more graphical and complicated website interaction. Java applets have since been depreciated in most browsers, so I have recreates them in JavaScript and the Canvas tag.