Are you a dinosaur? (1992)

In 1992 I did some illustrations for now-defunct Computer Contractor magazine (a VNU publication). I’m pretty sure I never saw the text copy for the articles I was illustrating; I was just given titles to work with. This one was something to do with keeping skills up-to-date, with a title like “Are you a computing dinosaur?”

The CRT monitor and the satchel-style brief case both look distinctly vintage now, but to be fair they were drawn to look dated then.

The prehistoric details for a young programmer of today to notice are perhaps the ANSI escape codes pinned to the cubicle wall. I had those pinned up at my own desk; as well as illustrating, I was also teaching some COBOL around this time, on VAX/VMS using VT220 terminals (the dinosaur’s sheet seems to explicitly mention VT100). If you really, really care, the selected escape sequences are ones primarily concerned with moving the cursor around. That was how we used to get “tab to next input” to work in the olden days.

See more vintage Beholder nostalgia.