A few years back when the Flash drawing app Scribbler & innumerable clones got briefly popular, I showed them to After Effects creator Dave Simons. “Oh,” he said, “I remember creating something like that in school 20 years ago.” Sometimes it seems there’s nothing new under the sun: Five years ago you could make a hot HTML5 blog by recreating hot Flash designs from 10 years earlier, which in turn were repurposing Java applets from five years before that, which… you get the picture.

I think of all this when seeing the winners of a computer art contest from 1968. As Kottke notes, the ads are fun to peruse as well.