Creative Inventors

A Eulogy to Clip Art, in Clip Art.

The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop," Microsoft announced in a blog post on 1 December 2014. The collection of images that have graced so many PowerPoint presentations, family newsletters, and school-field-trip calendars is no more; now, if you want to decorate a document, you'll have to do what you've probably been doing already, anyway: search online. Within Microsoft products, you'll be directed to Bing for your image-finding needs.

This was inevitable, probably, but it also marks the end of an era. If we were writing a newsletter announcing Microsoft's decision, the clip art we might select to illustrate the development would probably involve a tombstone, or a clock with a red X over its face, or simply a face—one whose expression conveys an acceptance that times change, but a sense of nostalgia for what we lose as we move forward.

But this isn't a newsletter. This is a eulogy—for a form of artistic expression that added wonder and whimsy to the words of a youthful Internet. Clip art may have been clumsy and weird; it was also earnest, and full of the possibilities that came with our newfound capabilities as publishers and creators and communicators.

Clip art was made possible because of the invention of desktop publishing in the early 1980s. The first library of professionally drawn clip art was provided by VCN ExecuVision and introduced in the IBM PC in 1983. It offered images to be used in presentations and newsletters.

During the mid-1990s, Microsoft also began offering clip art as a built-in feature in many of its products. In 1996, as part of its default installation, Microsoft Word 6.0 included 82 WMF clip-art files. (Compare that to today: Microsoft's Office product suite currently offers clip art as part of more than 140,000 media elements.)

RIP, Clip Art. You will still live on the Internet. And you will always be with us in spirit.

Word of the day: cold storage

Cold storage is the retention of inactive data that an organization rarely, if ever, expects to access.

Facebook has devoted considerable attention to the hardware used for a cold storage system through the Open Compute Project. Facebook found that storing its subscribers' older photos in the regular facility and making them available immediately took up huge volumes of storage space and wasted electricity. Today, the servers in its primary data centers are "always on" to provide immediate access to users' data but the servers in the cold storage facility are on "sleep mode" and kick-start only when there is a request for an archived image.

Object storage is one of the most common storage system types for cold data. Media choices for cold storage include tape or low-cost commodity hard disk drives because data retrieval and response time can be slower.