What If Computer Graphics Ran Under Crayola’s Law?

I love this timeline, showing the evolution of Crayola crayons from 1903 – eight colours, including poop – to 120 colours today. Now, imagine PC graphics running on Crayola’s Law, which states that the number of hues doubles every 28 years…

Let’s take the Colour/Graphics adaptor as a starting point.

Introduced in 1981, it was capable of displaying four colours in 320 x 240 pixels. Back then, it was all black, cyan, magenta and white, or black, red, brown and green. The world looked really bad.

The EGA era – 16 colours!- would have arrived in 2037. Fast forward to 2149, and witness the arrival humans to Jupiter and the Video Graphics adaptor, bringing 256 glorious colours in 320 x 240 pixels. 16-bit colour mode and its palette of 65,536 shades would have been enjoyed in 2373.

What about our current 16,777,216-tone palette, 24-bit RGB colour system? Not until the year 2597, people. [Weathersealed]