I found a GIF viewer for Windows 2.0 (it's shareware, called EASEL, super easy to find on warez CDs or from ToastyTech's site in Warez section).
Now I need GIFs. So I got Walnut Creek's CD with GIFs.
Among 30 or so categories, there is (amusingly) a category "FROGS". All the humans go to "PEOPLE" except (unamusingly) women in swimsuits, these go to "SWIMSUIT". Perhaps, the CD authors were running a swimsuit business.
There's a category "PLACES", and some images from there clearly seem to offer some sort of "Digital tours" to famous places over BBS. The quality of the tours varies.
From "ah, romance of Rome" to "this prison looks uncanny" to "kids this is what diznilend looks like!" to "fa^^ou5 5T0NEhEИGE"
@rl_dane@polymaths.socialGood gravy, it's like I nearly forgot that GIFs can be static images. I was totally expecting cheesy animations.
I'm not sure what the ability to store multiple images within a GIF was originally meant for, but I'm pretty sure animation was a hack at some point.
@rl_dane @nina_kali_nina It was intended for short animations; there was also some support for interactivity, but browsers never implemented that.
@rl_dane@polymaths.socialWhen I first started using GIFs in 1990, there was no way for the average home computer to decompress the images fast enough to do animation with it. It took my little mac a couple minutes to decompress (and then dither) a small a 320x200 image. Back then, you had dedicated animation formats like .DL and .GL (no relation to OpenGL).
I remember loading multi-image GIFs early on, but they were literally just multi-image containers. No animation.
@rl_dane @nina_kali_nina I remember making a 320x200 animation in some Corel program on a 486, converting it to .gif (this was the hardest part at the time), and then playing it back on a 286. It wasn't fast, but it did play at several frames per second.
But early animated GIFs were nowhere near that large.
@nina_kali_nina I never used Windows but for DOS there was a GIF viewer called "CompuShow" - I still use it occasionally on old machines. It can even display GIFs on monochrome Hercules display.
On Internet archive one can find plenty of those old CDs w/GIF content.
@aakoskin there are plenty GIF viewers for DOS, but the value of a GIF viewer for Windows is to copy the image in the clipboard and paste into a Word document. Or into a graphics editor. :)
@aakoskin @nina_kali_nina this reminds me of an old compilation CD called "Monolith" that had some games (Flight Simulator, Zeek and others) and some programs. Was trying to locate it, but unsuccessfully. Are there some other good places to look for it apart from the Internet Archive?
@dvim most likely, eBay. There might be some Torrents too, but it's less likely. Worth giving a shot