At 11 years old, my new Commodore Amiga blew my mind. But even I could tell that the firmware screen when you turned it on was, quote, "badly drawn". It turns out (as such things often do) that it is in fact an amazing feat of digital art made for an in-development machine long before it had drawing applications, plotted with vectors on graph paper and punched in as 412 bytes of machine code.
Here's the legendary graphic's creator, Sheryl Knowles:
We did every single illustration in the manuals, every "show it off" illustration that appeared in magazines or trade shows, and every practical graphic (i.e. the icons and fonts), pixel by pixel, with no tools other than being able to choose a color and place the pixel. No line tools. No fills. No shape tools. Two: We had no way to save our art work. So once designed, it had to go straight to the programmers to be coded in. I used a LOT of graph paper. Or, if it was an illustration, we had to photograph our screens and send that photo to the publisher needing it. Believe me, once Graphicraft was done, our jobs were so very much easier!
