What's Up

   For this issue, I'd like to try to describe how computer graphics works,
and some of the things you can do with it. When I told my partner Terry
about this idea, he said I'd need every page in this booklet just to get a
good start. Well, anyway, here goes.

   The viewing screen of your computer monitor is made up of literally
millions of tiny dots of a chemical that lights up, in varying levels of
brightness, when exited by a controlled flow of electrons. There are dots
of red, green, and blue. Red and green are pure colors of light, as seen
in the rainbow, or in lasers. Blue is a mixture of many colors of light.
Actually, blue is what you have left if you remove all of the red and
green from white sunlight. This is why these three colors work as
compliments to each other to make any color of visible light. And yes,
my dear, this is why the sky is blue!

   It is important to note that colors of light do not mix the same way as
colors of ink do. As a matter of fact, the two principals of making colors
are exactly the opposite of each other. Additive color synthesis can be
thought of as: darkness is black. As you add more light of the colors red,
green, and blue, the mixed color gets lighter, until you have full, and
equal intensities of all three, and that is white. Subtractive color
synthesis, on the other hand, starts with a white piece of paper. As you
add more and more ink (of a different set of three colors; cyan, magenta,
and yellow) the page gets darker, until it is covered with all three colors,
making it black. It is also interesting to note that if you mix any two of
the primary colors of light; red, green, and blue, in equal portions, you
get the three primary colors of ink in your color printer. And, amazingly
enough, it works just the other way around for your printer. If you mix
any two colors of ink; cyan, magenta, and yellow, in equal portions, you
get the primary colors of light; red green and blue. WOW!

   Since the video card in your computer is wholly responsible for putting
a nice looking color picture on your monitor, it does so in the most
efficient way it can. It actually keeps a record of the relative brightnesses
of all of those red, green, and blue dots individually. If your computer has
what's called a "true color" video card in it, it is capable of showing you
nearly 17 million different combinations of red, green, and blue. That is
way more different colors than the human eye can see --even gay humans!

   The resolution of your video display is the number of dots across the
screen verses the number of dots top to bottom. You see, all of these dots
are in perfect rows and columns. Typical screen resolutions are 640 X 480,
800 X 600, and 1024 X 768. The higher these numbers are, the more
detailed the picture appears. Also, higher numbers of dots require more
memory on your video card to store their individual values. I use
1152 X 864. You might notice that all of these number pairs have a
4 by 3 ratio.                                                            ===>