[Oberon] How I know you're all just playing

[Jack Johnson]

On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 12:06:36 -0700 (PDT), John Drake
<jmdrake_98 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I personally used to do a lot of image manipulation
> > work with earlier
> > versions of Oberon, before the days of PhotoShop.
> 
> Were you using Rembrant or something else?

I think this was pre-Rembrant.  I was manipulating Targa files, adding
text to satellite images and maps before they were broadcast.

We never needed to see the images, and they were previewed by someone
else before broadcast.  We just needed to merge the data.  The images
had a constant perspective (hopefully), so we could plug in the data
in known locations and voila.

Someone would gather the data on diskette, bring it to the Oberon
workstation and start a process that would FTP the latest satellite
image, import the GIF into an Oberon image, insert text (drop-shadowed
by cheating) into the proper locations, export out to Targa and back
to the same disk.

It was probably 1990 or so, so technically Photoshop *did* exist
(version 1.0), but Oberon was so much easier, and even worth avoiding
the old Unix image manipulation tools to try to script something
similar.  Plus, we didn't have the best computing resources, so Unix
wasn't really an option.

The only thing I wished I would have done but never had the time to
implement was to anti-alias the text.