How Far We Have Come!!

[Ed Cordes]

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!! :cool:

[Roger Clark]

Ed,
Yes! I really need a USB 5.25-inch floppy drive with drivers that can read old 360K floppies. I somehow lost a chapter to one of my books. It's on an old machine that only has floppies. I would like to get rid of the machine, but don't dare until I recover this floppy. So I could run through several machines to recover it, but I've been putting it off. Maybe I should just send the floppy to a data recovery service, or just re-type in the lost chapter.

Roger

[Jim Michael]

There used to be file transfer applications that would transfer data over the serial connection. You should probably be able to find one of those on a free software site for old DOS programs. For cable I think you can find a serial to USB interface.

[Ed Cordes]

Thanks for the responses. Yes, the IOmega Zip drive is a serial connection. I knew I saved it and thought it would work. Just kind of interesting that I once considered 100 MB Zip drives to be huge. I often tell friends that when I print 13 X 19 high rez images I am dealing with files sometimes around 400 MB and they should think of it as needing 400 of those little hard floppies for one image!!!

Yes, Rodger, we also used the "real" 5 1/4 " floppy disks for original data storage in the early '80s.;)

[LouBuonomo]

Just tossed all of my floppies and Zips (including drives) in the beginning of the month.

I did keep an old Etherlink II card, drivers and a RG58 to Cat5 converter just in case.

Ed had to convert an old Access DB app I wrote in 2000 to a newer version.. that was an adventure since I haven't coded anything in at least 15yrs !

[Kerry Perkins]

The other day I made a five-image pano in CS4 and the resulting file was 1.2GB!! Where will it end? :) I also tossed my ZIP drive about two years ago. It had a SCSI interface. :D

[David Thomasson]

I wrote my PhD dissertation on one of these.



It had 256K of RAM, a 1.8 MHz (not GHz ... MHz) processor, and two floppy drives: one for the operating system (DOS 2.0)
and one for data. Each floppy held a whopping 356K! Imagine an operating system today needing only 356K of disk space.

Twenty years from now, people will be chuckling and shaking their heads over the pathetic limitations we are marveling at today
as cutting-edge technology. And it really is cutting-edge ... but the edge never stops cutting. ;)

[Aiden Blake]

Geez, how old are you guys?! :P just kidding

I remember my first computer - a 386DX with 1 MB of RAM. Funny how long it took manufacturers to finally phase out that 3" "floppy" disc drive.

[Jim Michael]

My first computer was an Osborne, a "portable" that weighed about 25 lbs. I did my graduate research on a Univac 1100. Each positron experiment took 15 minutes to analyze. When we got a Pentium I machine with Fortran in the lab we were able to reduce that to 15 seconds. These days I would guess it would run in under a second.

RE the file transfers, I think a couple of the programs were interlink and laplink. Interlink was a Microsoft program that shipped with later DOS versions and laplink was a commercial program which might be floating around on the 'net somewhere.

[john j. henderson]

My first two computers were an IBM Pal with 16k of memory and next a Commodor 64 with 64 K of memory. I remember purchasing my first hard drive, 10 mb for just over $800 dollars for a new XT 4.66 computer. Heck, when I first entered high school, I used a slide rule-calculators came out the next year.

Aiden, trust me, we are not that old. Technology has really changed in 30 years, okay, maybe to you "we are that old".