How Far We've Come!

[SA Bill]

I was cleaning my side of the bedroom as my penance for going to BB  next week and leaving the family behind. I found the CF card than came with my old Nikon CoolPix 4500. It's a Lexar made card with 16MB of storage capacity. 16MB! Wow...that's nothing...even for a "Starter Card" included with a new camera. Maybe back then (the card shows a 2001 copyright) it was enough for at least a few pics on a new camera. I popped it into my DSLR and it won't even hold one pic in RAW format. In the lowest quality JPEG setting on the current camera it will hold 4 pics. All that aside...the write speed for this card is a blazing 8x!!   Last time I bought a CF card I made sure it was at least a 233X write speed. Not that I need a lot of speed but it's nice to have.

Anyway, it's amazing how much..and fast...and cheap memory has become in the last few years. Are we getting spoiled?
  Bill  

[BigBendHiker]

I was cleaning my side of the bedroom as my penance for going to B  next week and leaving the family behind. I found the CF card than came with my old Nikon CoolPix 4500. It's a Lexar made card with 16MB of storage capacity. 16MB! Wow...that's nothing...even for a "Starter Card" included with a new camera. Maybe back then (the card shows a 2001 copyright) it was enough for at least a few pics on a new camera. I popped it into my DSLR and it won't even hold one pic in RAW format. In the lowest quality JPEG setting on the current camera it will hold 4 pics. All that aside...the write speed for this card is a blazing 8x!! Last time I bought a CF card I made sure it was at least a 233X write speed. Not that I need a lot of speed but it's nice to have.

Anyway, it's amazing how much..and fast...and cheap memory has become in the last few years. Are we getting spoiled?
  Bill

Indeed.  Moore's Law is alive and well: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

I remember the first microcomputer I worked on.  It was a Data General Nova 1200.  Just under 1 Mhz clock speed.  8K of ram (2K of which were taken up by the BASIC interpreter). 


BBH

[txhiker]

So True, I went to Best Buy yesterday to buy a laptop and prices are way down from last time I bought one. Technology has made so many leaps ahead. Truth is computer companies are way ahead with their technology by won't release it so as not to get in competition with themselves. Still..prices are low which is good for us. They didn't have many in stock so I'll wait till windows 7 comes out..supposedly it will be better than Vista.
I did walk out of Best Buy with my first DSLR  a Nikon D5000. I look forward to learning all the in's an out's as I really want to start taking some better more artsy pics than my POS (point and shoot). I'm glad prices have gone down on cameras too 

Yay for technology.

[SA Bill]

I remember the first microcomputer I worked on.  It was a Data General Nova 1200.  Just under 1 Mhz clock speed.  8K of ram (2K of which were taken up by the BASIC interpreter).  
BBH

I think my first hands-on experience computing experience was with a Radio Shack TRS-80. Before that, I did some punch card stuff when I was taking a course in college, circa 1977. We've REALLY come a long way since those times!!  
   Bill

[SA Bill]

Congrats on the new camera txhiker! 

Be sure to post some pics so we can see how it performs.
   Bill

[Casa Grande]

I remember my first digital camera...back in around 97?? It was more of a novelty really...not practical at all and quite large, bulky, and produced some crappy pics.  It used a standard floppy disk and was about .7mp (they didn't even measure in MP back then)  And the damn thing was expensive!    What amazes me is how fast they have progressed in the last few years ever since Digital has been taken seriously by the public finally.

The first digital camera I ever saw was back in 1990.  Produced about the same resolution as a crappy webcam and the only real practical use for it was as an instant proof viewer for professional photographers.   They would mount it next to their medium format camera and there was a special trigger that simultaneously shot the photo on both the film camera and the digital camera.  Professional photographers would shell out about $2500 for this system.  Yes, indeed, a long way we have come.

But, you haven't seen anything yet.  Digital will surpass what film ever dreamed of becoming.  Wait and see...

[Al]

The first microcomputer I used was an http://www.imsai.net/ with 64K of memory.  I complained it didn't have enough memory to handle the data sets I needed to model (A year's worth of operation's data for an industrial waste water treatment plant).  I was told any programmer worth his salt didn't need more than 64K, so we nibbled at the data and then recombined.  Those were the good old days with CP/M using Interpretive Basic.  Tried to keep up with the computer stuff but it has became secondary to my work.  Kind of made me mad when IBM used Microsoft MS-DOS, just enough difference to mess with you.  Life goes on.

Al

[tjavery]

Digital will surpass what film ever dreamed of becoming.  Wait and see...

In some respects, it already has. In fact, I think that you could argue that digital has surpassed everything but the largest film formats. (well, considering digital that is well beyond typical consumer's financial means, like 60MP medium format backs ).

[Terlingua50337]

From what I've read and heard digital surpassed even the finest grain film in resolution somewhere around the 7MP range. I really like digital but I miss film at times. Film, good film, just has a certain "feel" to it. As for systems, my first was a 286 DX 33 running DOS 2. something I think....with a whole 20 meg HD. Then I "stacked" the drive and I was in tall cotton!

[badknees]

1980

My first "real" PC was an IBM - Intel 8088 processor running at 4.77 mHz with 640k Ram and no HDD. Booted DOS from 5 1/4" floppy and could run Lotus 1-2-3.


Move forward to 2009.

Intel Quad Core i7 running at 3.8 GHz (Oc'd) with 12 GB Ram and 3 TB of HDD.

What's next?

[Doc Savage]

Funny this came up. I was just going over some pics recently and thinking how we now use a 1TB HD to store all our pics on having started with a 40GB pocket drive in 2004. I then thought back to the first hard drive I ever used. We upgraded the HP9845B we were using at work for automated testing and put a 20MB hard drive on it (we used DAT tapes and the year before had upgraded from the HP87X with dual floppies). The drive was about the size of a 2 drawer file cabinet. I had my 4GB thumb drive with me as I thought about this and almost started laughing.

Robert

[Roy]

Yep, the times they are a changin'.  Anyone else ever use a magnetic core machine?  Wasn't mine, belonged to the physics dept. when I was in college.  And I remember using paper tape to "save " our work.  Made good confetti.

[East Texan]

In college, we had a magnetic core machine with breadboard patch wiring that you connected the dots with wires to program the thing. Big tape drives for serial storage of data.
Of course my first home computer was steam powered.  I upgraded and bought a 100 meg hard drive for $500 bux, threw away all my floppy disks and didn't think I would ever need more storage.  Then along came Windows and graphics.  Wow I'm sure glad the price of storage has gown down since then.  Just think what a terabyte would cost back then.

I played with Algol, Cobol, Fortran, Basic, RPG II, dbase and who knows what else.  I was a real geek.

Today I would rather play with Photoshop, Genuine Fractals, and  Capture One to manipulate all those pixels I have captured.

 

Talk about photographic advances:  I had a black and white photo of Caddo lake that has sold about 15 copies at the gallery (11x14 print)
Then a client came and wanted a 24 x 30 print made of this particular shot.  The original shot was taken with a Canon D60 (6.3 mpx).
There was no way I could enlarge that file to 24x30 inches and still have any resolution at all.  I took my D40 out and tried to duplicate the shot.  Impossible.  Same spot, same time of day, DIFFERENT PICTURE.  Showed em to the client, she said "No, I want that one"

In comes Genuine Fractals.  I think this program is magic!  I upsized the print to 24x30 at 300dpi and got a very nice print.  Made a nice sale and the customer was thrilled.

Here's a 100% crop of part  of a 6.3mpx shot.  It opened at 10.24" x 6.827" at 300 p/in Photoshop shows it at 18.0 Mb
The re-sized  file is 30" x 24" at 300 p/in Photoshop shows file size now 185.4Mb

I cropped a 5" x 5" section of each size and here they are:

The original image 5"x 5"




And here's the 5"x5" crop of the enlarged image to 30x24




No sharpening or other modifications were made to the files.  They both came out of Camera Raw as copies and were only enlarged.

I think that's impressive.

How about it T.J.  Want to print some Giant Bibe Images?   

[Casa Grande]

My first computer was a Tandy MC-10 in 1983, I was 12.  It had 4kb of RAM, but splurged and got the expansion pack (about the size of a cell phone) and increase my RAM to 16Kb, quite a bit for that time.  There was no ROM.  It hooked up to my TV via RF modulator (remember those?) Any BASIC programs I made on it had to be saved on magnetic tape using a special tape drive that looked just like a little tape recorder.  I remember coding for hours just to make the stupid things say, "David is totally awesome!" scroll across my screen in one of 8 amazing colors:

David is totally awesome!
And, of course, if I accidentally unplugged it, I had to start all over again.  And then trying to debug it...sheesh!

[Al]

My first computer was a Tandy MC-10 in 1983, I was 12.  It had 4kb of RAM, but splurged and got the expansion pack (about the size of a cell phone) and increase my RAM to 16Kb, quite a bit for that time.  There was no ROM.  It hooked up to my TV via RF modulator (remember those?) Any BASIC programs I made on it had to be saved on magnetic tape using a special tape drive that looked just like a little tape recorder.  I remember coding for hours just to make the stupid things say, "David is totally awesome!" scroll across my screen in one of 8 amazing colors:

David is totally awesome!
And, of course, if I accidentally unplugged it, I had to start all over again.  And then trying to debug it...sheesh!

David, thanks for sharing a few details about what is obvious.  The one and only.  The last thing I remember buying from Tandy was a leather hide.  What on Earth has happened to Radio Shack!

Al