History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often tiles

Following (or, preceding) the previous post…

1.
Old computers loved 8×8 fonts and they also loved 8×8 graphics.

Since for many of those computers the graphics were displayed side by side without any gaps, the fonts had to waste a precious pixel or two to create some breathing room between the characters. But there was a benefit to this arrangement – you could seamlessly combine two or more tiles into something bigger.

You could see that already in built-in graphics for a late 1970s computer Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P: a lot of single-character graphics of houses, tanks, planes, and people – but also some that only made sense fused together, forming submarines, warships, or the U.S.S. Enterprise:

A later computer called Atari ST had an Atari logo spread across two characters, and an easter egg – a 16×16 face of “Bob”.

And Apple II’s character set allowed to combine a few glyphs into a running man, a folder, or a scrollbar:

Arcade videogames did the same. Pac-Man’s maze was assembled out of solitary 8×8 characters, but Pac-Man and his frenemies were large, clocking in at 16×16:

You can even spot a fascinating technique above. The ghost could cleanly fit in a 2×2 grid, but instead it’s offset vertically and takes up a 2×3 slot. Why? Just so the eyes and the “skirt” could move independently without a combinatorial explosion of tiles needed:

2.
Not long ago, we looked at various installation graphics for Mac OS X apps. Those creatively used a new feature of Finder: a way to specify a background image.

The Finder before Mac OS X, from 1984 to the late 1990s, didn’t have that feature, and yet you could occasionally see something like this:

How was it done? By splitting the graphics into many 32×32 icons, and then positioning them carefully inside the window.

The icons weren’t proxies of apps or even images. They were just there. The last ingredient was names composed of only whitespace, and it all started looking like one unbroken huge image… except when you invoked the Clean Up function, which proceeded to ruin the whole thing in a particularly delightful fashion:

3.
Ever since its launch in 2014, Slack allowed anyone at any workplace to create custom, shared emoji, and starting a year later, people could also use them in their reactions.

Those proved to be very popular, and many books could be written about how custom emoji reflect a given organization’s culture.

Many emoji could also be output side by side, and Slack chose not to put any space between them:

I think by know you know where this is going.

People started splicing bigger images into smaller emoji, first by hand…

…then with limited automation, and then via fully automated tools with names like slack-big-emoji or slack-emoji-enlarger:

As in every other version of this technique, assembling the tiles the proper way is part of the challenge. The one above looks like this:

:tjp3-000::tjp3-001::tjp3-002::tjp3-003::tjp3-004::tjp3-005::tjp3-006::tjp3-007::tjp3-008::tjp3-009::tjp3-010::tjp3-011::tjp3-012::tjp3-013::tjp3-014::tjp3-015::tjp3-016::tjp3-017::tjp3-018::tjp3-019:
:tjp3-020::tjp3-021::tjp3-022::tjp3-023::tjp3-024::tjp3-025::tjp3-026::tjp3-027::tjp3-028::tjp3-029::tjp3-030::tjp3-031::tjp3-032::tjp3-033::tjp3-034::tjp3-035::tjp3-036::tjp3-037::tjp3-038::tjp3-039:
:tjp3-040::tjp3-041::tjp3-042::tjp3-043::tjp3-044::tjp3-045::tjp3-046::tjp3-047::tjp3-048::tjp3-049::tjp3-050::tjp3-051::tjp3-052::tjp3-053::tjp3-054::tjp3-055::tjp3-056::tjp3-057::tjp3-058::tjp3-059:
:tjp3-060::tjp3-061::tjp3-062::tjp3-063::tjp3-064::tjp3-065::tjp3-066::tjp3-067::tjp3-068::tjp3-069::tjp3-070::tjp3-071::tjp3-072::tjp3-073::tjp3-074::tjp3-075::tjp3-076::tjp3-077::tjp3-078::tjp3-079:
:tjp3-080::tjp3-081::tjp3-082::tjp3-083::tjp3-084::tjp3-085::tjp3-086::tjp3-087::tjp3-088::tjp3-089::tjp3-090::tjp3-091::tjp3-092::tjp3-093::tjp3-094::tjp3-095::tjp3-096::tjp3-097::tjp3-098::tjp3-099:
:tjp3-100::tjp3-101::tjp3-102::tjp3-103::tjp3-104::tjp3-105::tjp3-106::tjp3-107::tjp3-108::tjp3-109::tjp3-110::tjp3-111::tjp3-112::tjp3-113::tjp3-114::tjp3-115::tjp3-116::tjp3-117::tjp3-118::tjp3-119:
:tjp3-120::tjp3-121::tjp3-122::tjp3-123::tjp3-124::tjp3-125::tjp3-126::tjp3-127::tjp3-128::tjp3-129::tjp3-130::tjp3-131::tjp3-132::tjp3-133::tjp3-134::tjp3-135::tjp3-136::tjp3-137::tjp3-138::tjp3-139:
:tjp3-140::tjp3-141::tjp3-142::tjp3-143::tjp3-144::tjp3-145::tjp3-146::tjp3-147::tjp3-148::tjp3-149::tjp3-150::tjp3-151::tjp3-152::tjp3-153::tjp3-154::tjp3-155::tjp3-156::tjp3-157::tjp3-158::tjp3-159:
:tjp3-160::tjp3-161::tjp3-162::tjp3-163::tjp3-164::tjp3-165::tjp3-166::tjp3-167::tjp3-168::tjp3-169::tjp3-170::tjp3-171::tjp3-172::tjp3-173::tjp3-174::tjp3-175::tjp3-176::tjp3-177::tjp3-178::tjp3-179:
:tjp3-180::tjp3-181::tjp3-182::tjp3-183::tjp3-184::tjp3-185::tjp3-186::tjp3-187::tjp3-188::tjp3-189::tjp3-190::tjp3-191::tjp3-192::tjp3-193::tjp3-194::tjp3-195::tjp3-196::tjp3-197::tjp3-198::tjp3-199:

What’s the point, you might ask, if Slack also allows to share images?

I am not sure there is one. Sure, you can write around the tiled image in a way you cannot around a regular image, and you don’t get any chrome. But the real rationale here is, simply, the love of the game.

But this is also why I love the details of history. You never know when an old detail chooses to come back to life again. Sometimes it will be a fun hack to try, but once in a while, it might be the only solution to a gnarly problem.

(Thank you to Andrew Yaros for teaching me about the tiling in classic Mac OS.)

#easter eggs #finder #games #graphics #hacks #history