Whilst digging through some old CDs I found the source file for this famous vector illustration from the early 1990s. It’s a technical drawing of a cutaway Ferrari F40 and was created by Dave Rumfelt using Deneba Canvas whilst he was working at Deneba Systems. These names might trigger some fond memories for Macintosh users.
The illustration was based on an earlier physical/airbrushed illustration by David A. Kimble, who is known for his cutaway car illustrations and also some Star Trek blueprints.
On my blog post I’ve also added embedded screen recording of me zooming into the illustration, and a recently exported 20-megapixel scrollable version.
That’s only 500 bytes per vector, including points and gradient information! SVG or other modern formats would likely be an order of magnitude larger.
Pretty wild, huh? What is also impressive is the file format and plugin architecture stayed compatible for many years across multiple Deneba apps (up until Deneba created the Windows version of Canvas). I have the utmost respect for their programmers and designers, whoever came up with those systems, as they stood the test of time for so long.
I remember Corel Draw coming on a big pile of floppy disks, the majority of which were (vector) clip art libraries. As I recall, this program was the thing that made my father’s company buy a CD-ROM drive: they put the Corel Draw clip art disk in it and shared it over the network so that people working on marketing things had an enormous pile of stock images to use, without needing massive disks or CD drives in their desktops (a CD drive was over £200 then, a disk big enough to install all of it was closer to £400, and a typical desktop cost about £1,000. Even with a 10 Mbit network, remote access was fine because the CD drive could manage no more than 150 KB/s with enormous seek times).
Mac resolution was 512x342, but a 4:3 projection would imply 384 pixels vertical, so to be square-on-screen, so unless Canvas compensated for this (which seems unlikely) it would be off by 11%
I don’t actually have the ability to see the video and vectors to verify that myself, but maybe that’s worth checking for?
Interesting hypothesis. I’ll look into it when I get a chance.
I downloaded the .sit and expanded it with The Unarchiver (does it lose a resource fork, possibly?) and I can’t open it with Acorn. Any tips? (It also appears as a generic file (no icon) and has no file extension, although this was not unusual for Mac documents which stored metadata like that in the resource fork… Crazy how we basically moved backwards from that… was it REALLY that hard to manage files with 2 forks on other filesystems?!?!)
EDIT: I also tried downloading the 400MB .cdr and macOS refuses to mount it (!) (Did they remove support for HFS?)
Any export you can provide in a format readable by modern vector graphics software but which preserves the vector data (such as Acorn, which I own) would be awesome. Would love to make a poster of this as I’m a Gen X nerd and old Mac fan ;)
You won’t be able to open the Canvas file in anything other than Canvas. I opened it in Canvas 3.5 on classic Macintosh System 7.5 (under emulation). Expanding the .SIT in that environment will be successful.
Yes, Apple removed support for HFS. (I’m sure you know HFS is not HFS+ or HFS Extended, which are still supported.) I guess Apple didn’t want to port legacy HFS to ARM, so they canned it. Last version of modern macOS with full HFS support was Mojave. It gradually broke in Big Sur and Catalina and by Monterey it is pretty much completely gone. That’s also the reason you can’t expand the .SIT successfully on modern macOS. There’s a MacFUSE plugin that might get you some of the way there to restoring HFS mounting, but it’s not 100% support. Again, classic Macintosh (through emulation) is the best way to mount such a CD-ROM image.
These things are exactly why I went to the effort of doing it and summarising in a blog post. It’s difficult!
Opening in Acorn will rasterize the vectors as a bitmap, which would give you the equivalent to the large 20MP bitmap I already provide.
I provide a PDF version for your scenario of printing a poster. Printing vectors is much more preferable than printing bitmaps. If the PDF is not sufficient (though in my experience it should be!) I’d like to know why.
Even an EPS export from Canvas (which was the intermediate step I used to generate the PDF) approximates a lot of the drawing compared to the Canvas file, because of the advanced drawing objects and styles that Canvas allowed. There are simply no equivalents to much of what Canvas did in either PostScript or PDF or any other modern format.
Would the modern-day Canvas app be able to open it?
Sadly I have no idea. Given the problems accessing legacy filesystems on modern macOS you’d have to try on Mojave.
This is a trip down memory lane because I had a laminated version of the original drawing on my wall as a kid. I had no idea there was a vector drawing of it!
Also, you should avoid putting long comments in the story description. Best to put it as a comment.
Awesome you had this! And thanks for the advice.