arhphotographic

In 1997 I took my first holiday to Scotland as a parent. Our son was three years old. Back then I was very pleased with my Yashica 107 MultiProgram camera and keen to record this event on film for posterity.

I was also the owner of an Intel Pentium 4 computer with an amazing 32MB (yes MegaBytes) of memory. Therefore the idea of having my negatives digitalised and put on a floppy ( do you remember those?) was a very appealing idea and very sensible I thought. I could have the negatives and digital copies what could go wrong.

Lets fast forward to 2020, many computers and cameras later. Sadly the negatives from that holiday have been lost. But wait I have the floppies! All I have to do is put them into the computer and I will be united again with the memories.

Imac – no floppy

Ipad- no floppy

Iphone – no floppy

iCloud – no floppy

Windows xp machine – with a floppy drive… hurrah!!

On putting the floppy into the drive not only were the images there but also some software from Kodak for viewing them. Note the system requirements for this software in the screenshot below

Having installed the program I was greeted with the groovy message seen below.

Just look at that cutting edge interface!

So what does a 12kb image look like today….

What about after a few simple adjustments…

There is no denying that I’m pleased I have some record of that holiday. I would be much happier if I still had the original negatives as I could have scanned them at a greater resolution.

This experience does illustrate a number of points.

In 1997 I was happy to view my 12kb images with my computer and 15 inch screen. However today that doesn’t look so great on my 27 inch iMac with its Resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels. What’s to say that my 20+mb images I take today, will not suffer the same problem with the technology of the future, even if I store them in the cloud!

I was grateful to have my old computer around to help me in my hour of need. But will the technology be there to bring these images back in the future?

How many times have I berated myself for not backing up my images, but perhaps I need to consider what format and how I back-up.