It’s quite a refreshing stance from Google considering they
ran a “Go Paperless in 2013” campaign. Between Kodak not explaining that you
could print digital photos, Facebook’s convenience for uploading them and
bigger and better televisions for displaying photos, the photographic printing
industry has been in decline for quite some time, and yet it should be in
demand now more than ever.
To illustrate, when my son was very young he produced this
wonderfully sentimental picture of our family drawn through his eyes. The
trouble was he produced it on a PC that was rather old using software which ran
on an old OS - Windows ’98. It was Bill
& Ben and you could have great fun playing with pipes and joining bits
together to help them go through drain pipes to get to the bottom without
falling off which was great fun for him (and me)! It also came with a drawing
program which worked very much like Windows Paint…… and that’s when the problems
started.
As soon as I saw the picture I knew I wanted to keep it - it
wasn’t the random mess that some kids produce. It had shape, scale, accurate
colour and that wonderful way that children manage to draw pictures that all
mum’s and dad’s know. Not a problem I thought, I’ll just save the file and copy
it off. One whole day later I finally managed it!
You see the Bill & Ben program couldn’t save the file in
any standard format other than its own proprietary format. At first I thought
that this would be just a case of renaming the file - it’s bound to be
standard. Even with file renaming, hex editors etc. to this day I still have no
idea what format it was. There was certainly nothing within the file to give
any indication as to what it was.
The solution finally came from printing it, but as I wanted
to keep the file as well I had to figure a way to get hold of the printed file.
That’s when the idea of a PDF printer driver came to mind and then many hours
of searching the internet (using a terrible version of internet explorer) for
some old Windows ’98 software that could do it. Many, many hours later I
finally succeeded - I now had a PDF. I couldn’t view the PDF as there was no
PDF viewer installed on this old clunker but at least it was in a standard
format.
Now to copy it off…. This should be easy but it turned into
a nightmare. For starters the old PC had a floppy drive. My newer PC did not. It
had a CD-ROM but no writer. Hmmmm. Aha, USB thumb drive to the rescue. Except
Windows ’98 was just at the cusp of USB and it was all kind of new. The first
three USB thumb drives didn’t work - wouldn’t mount them at all. Even tried FAT
16 (yuk). No joy - Ahhhhhh! Then I had the hair brained idea of removing the
drive and copying it off direct in the new PC. Except it was IDE and the newer
PC was SATA…. Back to the drawing board.
Eventually (or should I say the long shot) I tried a very
old USB thumb drive and as luck would have it - it worked. Some old USB drive
with some old piece of software which you ran like a CD finally managed to get
the old clunker to copy off the PDF
Finally I could get it onto a modern computer to allow me to
print it out on canvas. Phew! What a palaver to go through. I very nearly
failed to get a readable digital version that was compatible with my modern
computer and I am eternally grateful to that old USB thumb drive.
Video, Camcorder, Cine, Records, Tapes,
Slides, Negatives
& Transparencies
It’s not just your photos that can get stuck on obsolete
computers - video is just as prone. Betamax, VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, Video 8, Hi-8,
Digital 8, Mini DV, 8mm cine, Super 8mm cine, 16mm cine….. Then there are 78,
45 & 33 records, audio cassettes, slides, negatives (110, 35mm, 120, 5x4)….
And the list goes on.
Fortunately we can still convert these, but I wouldn’t hang
around as a lot of the equipment is old and will eventually break. At that
point you’re stuck with something that cannot be read or transferred. Remember
Video 2000? Or Syquest drives? Or Smart media cards. Or Firewire? And what
about USB - is this the next generation of floppy disk? How long before it’s
just wifi and Bluetooth? And what happens when it becomes wifi2 or whatever
they call it?
