(Something has gone horribly wrong with the layout of this post, I am working on a fix right now, although it’s an interesting thing to look at). Yes, that header image is of Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry (AKA Blondie); they will integrate into the story in a moment.

One of the most groundbreaking PCs ever created turned 30 years old last week, and Ars Technica has an absolutely fascinating eight-part series on the machine, its development, and its impact on technology.

I didn’t have the chance to mention this in our hardware discussion, however when I was an undergrad in college I had gone to buy a particular PC and the salesperson asked if I wanted to purchase an additional 25MB (that’s megabyte, mind you) hard drive for $500. I said in response that I had no use for something like that because I would never be able to fill up a 25MB hard drive in my lifetime. The 3 1/2″ floppies were enough for me.

That was around 1988 and the PC I was buying was a Commodore Amiga 500. Developed by the same company that had created the Commodore 64 – the best selling PC of all time – the Amiga was well-regarded as the machine to beat. It had 512 MB of memory, expandable to 1GB, an unheard of amount at the time. It’s graphical user interface (remember that?) was way ahead of its time and its graphics capabilities were so advanced that television networks used it to make the animations for everything from station identification bumps to the animated opening for Monday Night Football. And of course you could just mosey through dungeons if that was your thing.

These were the pinnacle of PC graphics in the late 80s

Interesting side note: if you ever saw the movie Wayne’s World, Dana Carvey’s character Garth Algar was actually modeled after his brother, who was one of the developers of the Amiga program Video Toaster, which not only was a video editor used for the kind of animation just mentioned, the software actually won an Emmy!

The reason I bring all of this up is because just recently, art created by well-known pop-culture artist Andy Warhol – on an Amiga computer using the GraphiCraft program – was just discovered on a cache of floppy disks. He made the creations during a collaboration with Amiga, but they weren’t discovered until recently.

Amiga art created by Andy Warhol

This is the first discovery of its kind that I can remember, that being digital art created by a well-known artist on a vintage PC., and I suspect it will be the last. Many people create digital art today, but Andy Warhol was creating it at the forefront of computer graphics capabilities, over twenty years ago.

I just threw this picture in because I like it. That’s an Amiga 500.