Physical Deterioration, Digital Decay

Over at Down the Road, Jim Grey is scanning some negatives he took back in 1982, pictures of friends and memories from his high school days.

This hits a note for me, because I have a huge box of negatives in the attic from my peak photography days in 1990-1992. I was working in one hour photo labs and as a photographer's assistant, and so I got discounted film and prints and free processing. Well, technically processing was supposed to be discounted, too, but no manager I ever worked for cared if you ran your film through the processor during a lull in the workday or charged you to do so, since there was no actual cost to the company for it.

The funny thing is that most of my earliest digital photographs, from the early Mavica days in late '01 up through probably 2007 or so, are inaccessible to me right now. Anything I kept saved to a hard drive is quietly succumbing to bit rot on a dusty Celeron tower in a cobwebby corner of the attic. Anything I didn't save to HDD, well... who knows where those floppies are, assuming I even bothered to save them through two moves?

I've been a much better digital custodian since then, and have photos saved to multiple places, but I really should get a proper on-site RAID setup, rather than using just the single external HDD I am now.

I should also look into scanning some of those old negatives. I mean, I've got photos of Lance Armstrong winning the First Union Grand Prix in Atlanta, his first big race win, in there someplace.

I don't know whether I should get a proper scanner, or just a simple light table and use my phone for a scanner, though...

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Digital Fossils

In a Telegram conversation, I remarked that the 7" Kindle Fire tablets that Amazon is selling for the price of dinner for two at Applebee's would have been props on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Marko replied "If the Fire had existed when TNG was still running, it would have been the most powerful computing device on the planet by a fair margin. Weird to think about."

He's not wrong, either.

I remember back in the days of dialup and BBSes, call it 1990 or so, one of the rotating sig lines in my SLMR (Silly Little Mail Reader) file was "And you may tell yourself 'This is not my one gig drive'."

My boyfriend at the time had a 386DX 33 with an HDD that was so huge that it had to be partitioned into virtual drives. Like eighty whole megabites or something like that!

Coincidentally, the SD card slot on my computer right now is occupied by a 64GB card from an old Nikon D7100. Each 24 megapixel RAW image file takes up over 30MB. 

My wristwatch has higher screen resolution than a Sega Genesis.

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