Computer Technology

[Greg]

In 1992 we were one of the first photo departments in the country to acquire a Kodak DCS 200 along with a couple of Macs and a Kodak Dye Sublimation printer. At one dedication we were actually able to take a picture of the main speaker, and an hour later present him with a framed color print as he was leaving. We also used to label photographs for the researchers for publication. Worst thing was when a text correction had to be made.... with layers yet to come, and if I remember correctly, editing text was not possible or something like that. Digital files were archived on DAT cassettes which would frequently jam up in the player/reader. A few years later our director decided that our department would be the place to come to when people wanted prints made... he believed that none of the other departments in the institution would be able to buy desktop printers, let alone even get Photoshop. At that point I realized that our department's future was soon doomed. He also believed that getting involved in building the institution's initial website was a waste of time and energy. "Let someone else take on that crazy idea" was basically his view.

[Jim Jones]

Ah, those space age motherboards! From 1956 to 1959 I was one of a few repairmen on a one-of-a-kind computer, contemporary with Univac 1 & 2, that had no printed boards. Everything was hard-wired. We were still finding connections that were never soldered. Mean time between failures was perhaps a few hours. At least we never had a transistor fail: there was only one in the whole computer, an improvised addition to the original design. But we did have over 10,000 vacuum tubes and twice that many germanium diodes. The diodes were apparently hand assembled and sere less reliable than the VTs. Of course the computer needed a room to itself with massive air conditioning for the 14 cabinets. We couldn't tell the computer to add one and one: that wasn't in its program.
Years later I thought my Tandy 1000 HX with a 4.77 clock rate (fifty times that of the VT computer) and almost instant initialization instead of the diagnostic program we had to run on the older computer to weed out anything that had failed overnight. The Tandy's DOS 2.1, the program, and almost all memory were stored on one 720k diskette. Back then those diskettes came unformatted and cost several dollars. We've come a long way since those days, too.

[Tin Can]

Yes, Flickr will prove to be a bad choice...

My first couple years here I used the standard forum image hosting regimen often warning people that did not, of the impending mess, but changed to Flickr links to compete with the large screen images possible.

As I search in time on this Forum, it is riddled with lost image links.

For me digital anything is ephemeral.

I suppose data historians in future may find our files, but I won't.