Byte Magazine’s “Inside IBM” Cover Re-created As a Photograph

I’ve been re-creating Robert Tinney’s Byte magazine paintings as photographs. My latest work is “Inside IBM”.

Byte’s November 1983 issue had a feature story about IBM’s newly released PC XT. Mr. Tinney painted a cover showing how little men inside a monochrome model 5151 monitor were how it really worked – none of this cathode ray tube rubbish! As I’ve done with Computer Engineering and Chip Building, I re-created Tinney’s vision as if it were real, and as if a photographer had been standing next to Tinney as he painted.

(Mr. Tinney has given me permission to sell my photos. You can visit my store at bytecovers.galacticstudios.org.)

Tinney clearly had a disassembled 5151 to work from; the components he painted on the PCB closely match what I found when I opened up the same model monitor. But he took some artistic license: he gave the board a green solder mask, when in reality the boards are bare orange/brown; he built some molded plastic around the brightness and contrast potentiometers to give his welder a place to stand; he provided his welder with a ladder that he would surely break his neck on; and he was undoubtedly directed by Byte’s editors to paint the IBM logo on the monitor’s screen.

As a photographer, I was not afforded such liberties, and so there are compositional differences between Tinney’s painting and my photo. All I can say is, with all due respect to Mr. Tinney, photos don’t lie.  🙂

Of all the Byte covers I’ve re-created, this was the most challenging. With four people and their associated furniture, compositing this image was much more complicated than Chip Building. Computer Engineering was comparable, but photographing and compositing inanimate objects was easier than compositing people and cleaning up some of the ugly parts of the monitor.

Here are all my covers to date: