How Far We Have Come

While this is not directly related to photography, it is related to digital work flow.

One of the charity clinics I volunteer with had an old computer with Windows 95 on it. We used an Access data base to keep track of some patient stuff. Well, someone donated a computer with XP - great!! However, I could not get the DB file off of the 95 computer. The file was too big for a floppy (1.3 MB) and the CD was a CD ROM not a RW. I tried to use a USB Flash drive and could not get the 95 to recognize it.

Finally I took the old CPU home and loaded an old IOmega Zip drive onto it. This has removable disks that were capable of the tremendous capacity of 100MB!!! I quickly realized that the 100MB disks I thought were so large several years ago would only hold about 4 RAW images from my newest cameras!!!!

In any case, I was able to transfer the Access file to the Zip drive and then load it an old XP machine I have at home then to a flash drive to soon be uploaded to the new, but used XP machine at the clinic.

My point in this rather long post is that we get all wrapped up in the technology of photography and computers that we must stop and realize how far we have come. I remember when I paid extra to get 128K of memory in my first computer in 1982! It is also a wake up call that we must, as expensive as it is, constantly upgrade to the newer computer stuff so our older data doesn't become inaccessible.

Man! Do we take things for granted!!

How about looking at it this way : in 1985, 512KB of RAM was at least $200. That's "K", not "M". Inflation means that that amount is about $400 in today's dollars. For $400 now, you can buy about 12 GB, with a "G" of DDR3 RAM.

So for the equivalent cost from 1985, you now get 24,000 times the memory capacity.

How about looking at it this way : in 1985, 512KB of RAM was at least $200. That's "K", not "M". Inflation means that that amount is about $400 in today's dollars. For $400 now, you can buy about 12 GB, with a "G" of DDR3 RAM.

So for the equivalent cost from 1985, you now get 24,000 times the memory capacity.

Absolutely correct. However, if I don't have a machine that reads the old media then all the RAM in the world is useless!

Taking my Apple IIe from 48K to 64K cost me $1,200. Worth every penny, but $1,200 today - without adjusting for inflation - would buy 53GB of RAM. More than Three MILLION times as much memory. Hard drives are even more absurd. My 5MB Prodrive for my Lisa cost $2,000, without adjusting for inflation. I saw 2 TB drives on sale at Sam's Saturday for less than $250. From $400/MB to a ten-thousandth of a penny.

Hey Ed

"How far have we come?"

I don't know but I often wonder in which direction it is we're headed. :)

Cheers

Carl

I can remember in 1976 we upgraded one of our lab computers from 16k to 64k, and did not know how to use it all. I think this reflects camera technology, a lot of added bells and whistles, but does this make me a better or worse photographer? Just give me a 12 mp camera with S, A and M modes, no video, no preprogramed modes, just plain old fashion photography. The mind has been replaced by a microchip.

LOL We started with a 16K Timex Sinclare that had to have the program re-entered every time you fired it up. When we had a Commodore 64 they came out with 1 megabyte hard drive. Wow, a whole megabyte! what would anyone ever do with a who megabyte?

BTW you could have downloaded a free program called File Splitter to break the Access DB into smaller files then reassembled it with the same program on the new computer.

Where we're headed? Capt. Kirk: "Computer, where it Spock?" Computer: "Spock is on the holodeck".

I’m feeling all nostalgic now.

I remember my first laptop way back to the late eighties! It was so, so heavy I looked like an orangatang with my knuckles dragging on the floor when I carried it from room to room! It was huge with a tiny screen!

My Blackberry Bold 9000 can do everything that laptop could do along with an almost endless list of capabilities and fit in my pocket! Goodbye hernia.

Cool! Scary! Wonderful! Frightening!

Whenever I start feeling blue about data storage issues I think of the National Archives, who have to store and retrieve every possible format (hardware and software) invented since the dawn of time. Same goes with the Smithsonian. My long-term storage problems, as bad as they are or could be, don't hold a candle to theirs. It doesn't solve my problem, but at least I feel a bit better.

After a week of battling an unstable network, a malfunctioning server, formatting drives, reinstalling operating systems, mysterious file corruptions, balky backup software, it's pretty easy to look back longingly at the days of blueprints instead of PDFs, drawing manually with pen and ink instead of AutoCAD. But it would be awfully hard actually to go back, wouldn't it? Just like I can't imagine going back to 35mm.

And based on the recent past, what must the near-term future hold Ten years from now will be wondering how we ever got along with megapixel cameras, gigabytes of RAM, and terabyte hard drives? Just imagine if the answer is "yes"