Here's the history of this image, along with comments from the person on whose computer I created it.

MOONTREE is probably the first computer graphic image I ever created, excluding ASCII art. I was at a party at a friend's place [date??], and we were playing around with his computer, and I got into something like an icon editor for a menu shell [???] and there I built, pixel by pixel with the arrow keys, etc., an image of a tree silhouetted against a full moon. I saved it as MOONTREE, that being a legal MS-DOS filename.

Years passed, and I mostly forgot about it. The friend's hard disk crashed, and he thought he'd lost it. Then it surfaced again, as an embedded graphic in some documents he'd archived to floppy. So he did the equivalent of scissoring it out and gave me a copy. It had been resampled to a larger size, but with minor cleanup of sampling artifacts I was able to restore it to where it would resample back down cleanly. So the postage-stamp image (about right for an icon) is the true size in pixels, although I was working with enlarged pixels in the original editor.

The friend's comments:

Judging from the fact that I used it in a LASFAPAzine for December 1988, I'm pretty sure it was my birthday party earlier in that year. Since my birthday fell on a Friday that year, I'm almost certain it was the next day -- 24 September 1988. I trust that's good enough for your records.

The program was actually The Print Shop. I remember this because some people, then (and maybe still) LASFAPA members, took turns turning a picture of an eagle into a duck, and some other creature into a cow. These were then used as LASFAPA covers, labeled "This is not a cow" and "This is not a duck" respectively. I did *also* have a program called Iconvert, which allowed for some translation between graphic formats, but not editing, and it certainly had nothing to do with Windows icons.

You may use my name in the explanation if you wish, but you don't have to if it's inconsistent with your writing style. If you do, I suggest you might want to set my name up as a link when I get my web page up [look in the Links page for Matthew Tepper]. But again, you don't have to.