Even as technology marches on, there is a slowly growing enthusiasm for looking back on the history of computing, and preserving those still-working specimens of obsolete systems and vintage hardware and software that exist. The movement is known as retrocomputing, and although it’s mostly done as a hobby, I would argue that the people who collect and preserve these older specimens are doing a bit of digital curation in their own right.
It’s one thing to read about older computers in the mid to late 20th century that shaped technology as it stands today. But looking up articles on PDP minicomputers, Apple IIs, TRS-80s, Commodore 64s and the like from your modern LCD desktop or iPhone just isn’t the same as actually getting to sit in front of one of these Old Greats and using them. And so, every so often, some of these retrocomputing enthusiasts get together and allow the interested public to do just that.
Recently the East Coast Vintage Computer Festival rolled into Wall Tonwship, NJ, and packed the InfoAge Science Center’s exhibit hall wall to wall with computer systems from decades past… most working well, some not so much. Even some of the much older minicomputers on display worked well for a while, until the systems consumed way too much power and blew the science center’s fuses, rendering them inoperable. But of the many old historic systems that did work, visitors could sit down and give them a spin. It was fascinating to be able make an IMSAI 8080 talk just like it did when fictional teenage hacker David Lightman used it to access military computers in the movie Wargames. Playing old cartridge games on a genuine Atari 800 was pretty neat as well. And although my BASIC programming was a little rusty, the old fascination I felt the first time I wrote a program in second grade came back, as I did it all over again.
Operating old computers can be quite a loud affair, as you’ll see in this video. Here, David Gesswein demonstrates a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer, connected – as a PDP-8 likely would have been in the mid-1960s – to an electromechanical ASR-33 Teletype machine. If you think CRT monitors are old-school, consider that this type of setup had no graphics at all. You had just the equivalent of an electric typewriter, a bank of switches and indicator lights, and some reel-to-reel tape machines to interact with. My, how we’re spoiled today…
Unfortunately, the clatter of Teletype and and the din of many excited geeks talking loudly drowns out the audio, but if you want to know more about the PDP-8, David Gesswein has his own website explaining its intricacies, and even lets you interact with a working PDP-8 online.
A wide assortment of photos taken at the festival appear after the jump link below. Enjoy!
Image Gallery: Vintage Computing Festival East 6.0
For two years, owners of Apple’s iPhone have complained bitterly about the lack of video recording capability, something that has become more and more common on mobile devices, if not yet matured. Three weeks ago, they finally got their wish, and the results have been quite dramatic.
The weekend after Apple’s latest reveal – the iPhone 3GS – was released to the public, YouTube reported a massive 400% surge in the number of mobile video uploads, attesting to the mass appeal of Apple’s product and opening the floodgates for new video content.
Admittedly, seeing the sudden unleashing of newly-minted cellphone videographers made me cringe a bit, at first. For a while now, I’ve been kind of annoyed with the popularity of cell phone video. Let’s face it, although lots of people want something small and compact to make quick videos with, the image and sound quality coming from these devices has been utterly deplorable. Blocky video, muddy sound… in general, not something you really want to store cherished memories with. But what really stuck in my craw was when news sources started relying on cellphone videography as poor substitutes for actual newsgathering. I began to ask myself: When did yanking video off a YouTube account start to pass as acceptable broadcast-quality content?
Within the past couple of months, however, things have changed quite a bit. It actually started when camera makers like Canon began including video capabilities into their Digital SLR cameras, such as the Canon T1i. Although it looks nothing like a camcorder, this model actually records some incredibly good HD-quality video, and can store it on a postage-stamp sized SD card. It’s still rather bulky and expensive though; not the kind of thing an average person on the street would carry with them at all times.
Apple, however, changed that. They finally decided to include video capabilities on their latest device. And, they did the job so well that some aspiring independent film makers are now shooting films solely with the iPhone. While the critical acclaim of the subject matter is best left open to judgement, one can’t deny the video quality is astoundingly good, compared to what everyone is used to from a cellphone.
Additionally, a professionally produced music video has been recorded and edited using the same gadget. But you wouldn’t know this came from an iPhone unless someone told you in advance:
Of course, the raw video underwent a lot of post-processing before yielding the finished product we see above. But the unprocessed, full-color raw footage direct from the iPhone camera shows that it’s certainly no slouch on its own:
The ramifications are clearly huge. There’s been lots of talk about how accessible good video recording technology has become, but now the technology to have a high quality video recorder literally in your pocket is available to the masses.
The technical specs of the videos created aren’t lightweight by any means, either. Some users have reported that an hour of video from an iPhone 3GS can take up as much as 8GB of storage. Still not on par with the roughly 20GB per hour that broadcast-level DV video consumes, but not anything to sneeze at, either. The wide availability of this level of video production is going to require lots of supporting memory and storage to back it up. And the metadata and details surrounding each and every video produced could be enough to turn the average cell phone user into amateur video catalogers, as well.
For professional curators, this could be both good and bad news. From my perspective, it’s good that there’s a better chance history-making content will actually be recorded on a camera worthy of capturing it, as opposed to poor specimens of history like this. On the other hand, this means that good quality video will be coming from multitudes of sources, more than we’ve ever been accustomed to, as more and more individuals have the technology within their grasp.
An interesting tidbit from General Electric may possibly breathe new life into removable-disc storage, with their just-announced holographic technology:
NISKAYUNA, N.Y., Apr 27, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) — GE | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating — GE Global Research, the technology development arm of the General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), today announced a major breakthrough in the development of next generation optical storage technology. GE researchers have successfully demonstrated a threshold micro-holographic storage material that can support 500 gigabytes of storage capacity in a standard DVD-size disc. This is equal to the capacity of 20 single-layer Blu-ray discs, 100 DVDs or the hard drive for a large desktop computer.
Impressive storage for a CD form factor. However, as other technology sites are pointing out, cramming more data into a CD-sized disc doesn’t mean that the general public is going to automatically adopt it. Currently, several factors are conspiring against this type of removable media:
– Blu-Ray. This format was supposed to be the heralded new technology for consumers and video enthusiasts to obtain and store their high definition video along with “massive” amounts (25-50GB) of data. However, Blu-ray has been out for a couple of years now, and adoption has been tepid at best. most hopes were pinned on mass adoption in 2009, but this assumes that the economy qill recover quickly enough for large swaths of consumers to start spending on consumer technology again.
Somehow I have my doubts that this announcement of an “even better” technology will make the situation any better. We haven’t even realized the potential of Blu-ray, and those who have shelled out money on Blu-Ray players and discs now face the possibility that obsolescence of the format may already be close at hand, far sooner than faced by DVD.
One of the more frequent debates that I see cropping up often in preservation circles is how best to preserve “born digital” photographs: those photos that never began as physical film, but originated on a digital camera.
This isn’t an easy topic. There is no industry standard for born digital image preservation. Digital cameras of different vintages and configurations will output in one of a handful of differing file formats, and their metadata will often differ as well. And so, preservationists have been largely left to their own devices, fabricating their own methods, preferred formats and storage procedures for handling this type of material.
One controversial method that has been suggested is to forget about digital altogether, and to use a pigment-based inkjet or die-sub printer to print physical copies of digital photographs and rely on the hard copies as the long-term archive. This is a tempting method for lots of curators who have been trained to trust the physical, and without delving too deep into the specifics this seems at first blush like sound reasoning.
Unfortunately, it can be a very bad idea, and here’s why.
This is by far the most important reason, and yet not really the most obvious to some. For laypeople, and for the less-experienced in digital formats, creating a print from a digital files is a lot like doing the same from analog film. However, inkjet and photo printers are not going to give you the same level of quality as a true analog photographic print. And the print, while fine to the naked eye, will suffer a significant degradation compared to the original.
The best way to prove this is to take a digital image, make a print, and then rescan it. Here, for instance, is a born digital image taken from a Canon EOS 30D, shot and preserved in Camera RAW format, and presented here as a 24-bit PNG file:
(Note: clicking on the above image will take you to the full-resolution photograph, a 16MB file.)
I printed this image on a Kodak Photo Printer, using pigment inks, on 4×6 Kodak photo paper. Then, I rescanned the image at 1200dpi, using the scanner attached to the same photo printer. Here’s the resulting re-scan:
(Note: clicking on the above image will take you to the full-resolution re-scanned photograph, also a 16MB file.
At these reduced resolutions, there doesn’t seem to be much difference. The color appears slightly off, but it isn’t so bad… right? Well, let’s look a little closer at the re-scan:
Yikes! Clearly, there’s a significant compromise in image quality here, and this is because photo printers, regardless of how good they are, rely on printing methods that are unlike the traditional photograph, and through which the same level of quality doesn’t translate if you’re doing a bit-per-bit scan. This becomes even more evident when you compare the re-scan with the digital master, at the same scale.
If this argument isn’t compelling enough, there are other reasons for not relying on a hard copy as your preservation master.
Most modern digital cameras embed technical metadata into their image files, either by using EXIF, or as built in fields into their own Camera Raw format. This information can contain information about the camera which too the photo, what settings were used, what lenses, time and date, and even the GPS location of the camera, i properly equipped. It goes without saying that all of this potentially valuable metadata is lost if a hard copy is used as a preservation master, in lieu of the digital.
Having and preserving the original file created by a digital camera affords a curator, editor or researcher a great deal of leeway and making adjustments to derivative presentation copies. Things like localized color adjustments are very easy to do with the digital master present, particularly if the master is a Camera Raw. On the other hand, your options are very limited if all you have is a print.
The best option for preserving born-digital photos remains keeping them digital. This does have implications for curators wanting to do right by their collections, and it can make the uninitiated very anxious. Capital purchases for technology, backups, and whole new workflows and best practices must be established. Fortunately, the world of digital curation is starting to come into its own, and others have already begun to tread these waters. In future articles, I will outline some best practices and case studies I’ve undertaken and encountered, to help guide those seeking answers to the digital dilemma.
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