Back in 1996, DVP celebrated its 15th anniversary. When looking through my digital and paper archive, I found this gem: The official badge and logo for the 1996 anniversary! We also produced some mouse pads with this logo on them, one of which I still use for my daily job. Pretty good quality I must say.
The picture shown here was saved as GIF for use on the web. But scarily enough, apart from a few more GIF files, I could not open or even understand the file type of most of the files from that time, only ten years ago. Our digital archives are not very robust — more on that below.
What is kind of scary is that apart from the various GIF and TIFF renderings of the logo in various uses (for usage on the primitive web pages of 1996 mainly), I cannot retrieve the design data. It is all inside FreeHand 4 or FreeHand 5 files, for the Mac platform, using postscript fonts that only worked on MacOS 7 and 8 with Adobe Type Manager. So even if the files themselves are salvagable using contemporary software in 2007, some of the basic data they are built from is irretrievable for me. I gave away my last old Mac five years ago, and it is now dead.
A bit scary. And a good example of when simulation of a computer system could serve us well as a way to preserve the entirety of old software environment. I think this is a typical case of when you need the complete system a document was built on and not just the document itself to correctly interpret it. I guess I should make sure to “freeze” some current system environment inside a disk image at some point, to have something to go back in the future. Provided some software behaving like a 2007 PC can be created and found.
Final note: it around this time that I designed the version of the “cons box” seen as part of the logo above. This served for quite a few years as the main style of the logo of the computer science program at Uppsala University. It seems to have fallen out of use now.