"It's as easy as a floppy."

The Sony Digital Mavica FD-7 seemed so exciting back when it was new, and I wanted one. Its attractiveness stemmed from the cheap and familiar media it used for image storage: standard 3.5″ floppy disks. Most digital cameras of the day required expensive, obscure flash cards for storage and proprietary software to extract photos from the camera (through a painfully slow serial cable). With the FD-7, one needed only to insert the image disk into one's computer floppy drive and copy the pictures off. But the technological price of this convenience was high: the camera's maximum image resolution was 640×480 — anything bigger, and you'd only be able to fit a couple photos on a single 1.4 megabyte disk.

Funny enough, I recall ghost enthusiasts on the Internet circa 1998 picking the FD-7 as their camera of choice for its uncanny ability to capture vast flurries of out-of-focus dust (aka "ghost orbs"). That endorsement alone speaks volumes about the camera's lackluster optical qualities. Also, this new breed of digital ghost hunters didn't have to feel guilty about taking endless rolls of 35mm dust photos, which can get quite expensive to develop.

Discussion topic of the week: Tell us about the first digital camera you ever used. What brand was it, and what image resolution could it capture?

Computers? What is the world coming to?

Here's another item from my grandmother's cedar chest — I love these old newspaper line-art illustrations. ECS was Oak Ridge, Tennessee's first retail computer store, if I recall correctly from an old article I read. They advertised quite a lot in the local newspaper, including the ad for the Apple II you see above.

The Apple II's configuration with two Disk II drives and a small monitor on top is interesting. I believe I've seen Apple promotional photos from the early Apple II days with the same setup. The relatively tiny display seems somewhat silly from a modern perspective, but computer monitors were very expensive back then. A large one that would have covered the entire top of the Apple II would have cost $400 or more in 1980-ish dollars.

In fact, just perusing some ads in the back of a 1981 BYTE magazine, I don't see any monitors offered larger than a 13″ color Zenith for $399.95 ($933 in 2009 dollars). 9-inch to 12-inch monochrome monitors cost anywhere from $150 to $260, which is equivalent to $350 to $606 in 2009 dollars. You get the point — even entry-level displays back then cost an arm and a leg. Even if you paid two arms and two legs, the monitors were still relatively small.

Discussion topic of the week: Tell us about your first Apple II experience. Where and when was it, and why were you using it?

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The iPhone has nothing on this. (Click for full advertisement.)

Here we see the state-of-the-art in 1983 pocket computer technology, the TRS-80 PC-4. I have the PC-1 in this series, and it still seems advanced. How many other pocket calculators allow you to program in full BASIC?

I remember taking my PC-1 to high school in the mid-1990s and programming on the sly in my ELP class. It felt so high tech — and my model was made in 1980! Ah, those were the days.

Discussion topic of the week: What was the first PDA or pocket computer you ever used?

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https://twitter.com/benjedwards

Press photographers wait for Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1951
Photo: Gordon Parks / LIFE

Crowd members photograph Barack Obama, 2009
Photo: Pete Souza / White House

Digital technology has transmogrified today's consumer cameras into tiny, futuristic-looking gadgets. Notice how nobody holds them to their face anymore — they just stare at LCD screens.

Not only have the cameras changed, but the photographers have changed as well: it seems that everyone has an imaging device in their pocket these days. With the help of a blog, flickr account, or YouTube, ordinary people on the street often beat professional photojournalists to the punch when it comes to breaking news.

Of course, press photographers still exist in 2009, and their cameras are much bigger and more professional-looking than those seen here. I was just struck by the contrast between the flashbulb-slingers of old and the average citizen photographer of today.

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This ad for Tech-Sketch's Paint-N-Sketch Level II brings back memories. My first encounter with computer art came courtesy of KoalaPaint and the KoalaPad tablet on the Atari 800. Later, I fell in love with MousePaint on my family's Apple IIc. Using the mouse and creating shapes on the screen was a magical experience, and I regularly begged my father to boot it up for me so I could doodle around in four glorious colors. Because of the program's title, I was convinced it had something to do with Mickey Mouse.

Not too long after, my dad sold the Apple IIc, and I lacked an outlet for computer art until he bought a Macintosh SE in 1987. But that's another story all together. Now it's your turn.

Discussion topic of the week: Tell us about your first computer art experience. What computer and software did you use?

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Ah yes; a worm pun.

Around the turn of the 1990s, "WORM" (Write Once Read Many) became a common computer industry buzz-word for a new mass-storage concept. Numerous companies released their own WORM drives that used proprietary forms of optical media, most of which were incompatible with other WORM drives. Seen here is such an attempt: a curious "Optical Card" from Canon that obviously didn't achieve widespread usage. According to the ad, it stored two megabytes of data on an optical layer that could be written once and never changed — much like a CD-R, but without the spinning disc.

Cursory Google searches reveal that the Canon Optical Card eventually saw limited trials as an identification card, either for travelers or medical information. Whether it's still in use today is unknown to me.

Discussion topic of the week: Do you recall using any strange computer storage media that didn't become a standard? (i.e. Bernoulli, magneto-optical, WORM, VHS, tape, cassette, Jaz, etc.) Tell us about the most exotic computer storage media you've used.

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With hurricane Gustav bearing down upon the Gulf coast of America, our minds inevitably turn to the powerful storms and the havoc they rain down upon those living within their reach. Growing up in North Carolina, I've experienced a few hurricanes in my short lifespan, even though I don't live on the coast. The worst for me personally, by far, was Fran, which flew far inland and leveled a hundred trees in my family's back yard. Hurricanes are ominous and frightening reminders that despite all of mankind's advances, we have yet to control weather's powerful and chaotic flow.

But our hands aren't fully tied: we can watch the weather and try to understand it. And the more we understand something, the less scary it seems. Imagine a hurricane hitting in a time before satellites or weather radar — with no more warning than the changing wind and a darkened sky.

[ Continue reading Hurricane Flashback » ]

A few years ago, I brought home a large old cedar chest that had once belonged to my grandmother. It had languished, mostly forgotten, in my parents' basement since my grandmother's death in 1992. Upon cracking it open, I was instantly overwhelmed by the stale funk of old paper. My wife, sensitive to allergies, had to leave the room.

Among the greeting cards, family quilts, and my grandfather's WWII uniform, I found the source of the smell: a large stack of vintage newspapers that my grandmother treasured. Some of the papers were fascinating windows to America's past — chronicling John Glenn in space, the first landing on the moon, and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Others dealt with less meaningful issues to me, such as unusually heavy winter weather or local events of eastern Tennessee.

Seeing an opportunity for Retro Scan of the Week, I combed through the newspapers looking for interesting material that I could share. The example you see below is the oldest VC&G-relevant ad I could find (I found others that I'll post later). It's a 1954 advertisement for a Westinghouse television set sold by "Don Cherry Tire Company."

Chattanooga's Greatest TV Value

The headline, while amazing to us today, is somewhat self-explanatory: in 1954, television was coming into many American households for the first time. We're witnessing, in print, the birth of an essential component of the personal computer and video game revolution — the affordable home TV set. Ironically, the small (likely 12-15″) black and white TV you see above sold for about $2,125.64 in 2008 dollars. Remember that the next time you plop down two grand for a new 42″ plasma.

Interestingly, I found a color ad for the same TV seen above on another site. And another here.

Discussion topic of the week: Tell us about your family TV set as a kid: when did your family get it, how big was it, and did you use it with home computers or video games?

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The transistor — need I say more?

Let's give a big round of applause to the electronic component that made our current computer revolution possible: the transistor. Here's an advertisement from RCA touting the benefits of solid state transistor technology from a time when it was still novel. 55 years later, we'd be cramming 300 million of these onto a single piece of silicon smaller than a penny. And Microsoft Word still runs slowly.

Discussion topic of the week: What was your first computer's CPU clock speed?

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