Since we’re talking about pixel art, in this 30-minute video, Stuart Brown known as Ahoy embarks on recreating an illustration called Four-Byte Burger:

The original picture was created by artist Jack Haeger on an influential computer Commodore Amiga in 1985, on prototype software that “was in such an early stage of development that it lacked a save feature, entirely.” Proper to-disk screenshotting didn’t come to computers until the 1990s, so the only reproduction of the picture was a photograph taken off of the display and reproduced in print in a manual for the graphics software; the original image pixels evaporated when the computer was eventually turned off.

Brown recreates the image using more modern means (Photoshop), but eventually goes back to an Amiga to try to display it as close to the original as possible. It’s a soothing watch, and there are some fun moments in the video, like rotating the CRT to “portrait mode” – in a world populated by smartphones, in some sense the image aspect ratio seems oddly prescient.

(Also, if you ever find yourself having to rotate a CRT, you can just degauss it instead of waiting all night. Degaussing a monitor is one of the forgotten weird tactile pleasures bordering on dark magic, and if you’re ever near an old CRT, ask someone to show you.)