How Fast Things Have Changed!

Gathering Storm at the Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, Colorado

www.dennismook.com

It is hard to believe and comprehend how fast things have changed in the digital world.  For you young people, you are pretty used to massive change as you have grown up with it.  But for those of us decades older, the quick pace of change really is surprising.  I won't go into "how it was when I was your age," but I wanted to relate a few of the changes in the digital world, with a highlight on the changes we have seen in photography in the past 20 years.  I continue to be amazed and delighted!

Talk about change in one's lifetime...  My grandfather was born in 1885 and died in 1977.  Near the end of his life, I sat and spoke with him about the changes he had witnessed during his lifetime.  He was born before automobiles existed and lived to see men walk on the moon!  That is change.  One lifetime.  Change now is coming even more rapidly.  And it will accelerate even more in the future.

My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer (COCO) which had no hard drive, as there were no hard drives then.  One used a cassette tape recorder to save and read the computer code your created.  It did have a slot for cartridges you could buy from Radio Shack which normally had games on them, extremely primitive compared to today.  Also, no monitor.  Nope.  You used your TV set.  Really low quality and a very primitive setup, but it was thrilling to actually have a computer at home.  I still have it, by the way.

The first PC I used at work was in 1986.  It was an IBM PC with a 40mb hard drive.  Not 40gb, forty megabytes!  That was huge.  Windows was 3.0 and many of the programs were in DOS so you had to know the commands in order to do anything.  Again, really primitive, but exciting to be on the ground floor of home computing.

What made me think about this was looking at my image files from my Nikon D800E.  Can you say huge?  Here are some typical file sizes:

45-48mb closed
207mb opened in Photoshop
71mb when saved as a TIFF file

Remember, the computer I had at work had a 40mb hard drive!  That would not even hold one D800E file, let along the operating system or any other programs of today.  I now have 4 3TB hard drives containing my files and two sets of backups.  A 3 TB file is 7500 times larger than my original hard drive (if my math is correct and it may, indeed, not be).

The pace of change is amazing and exhilarating!  I absolutely love it and can't wait to see what is around the next technological corner, then the next corner and the next corner and so on.  The one regret when my time comes to pass on will be that I won't be around to see what science and technology will give us down the road.

Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook


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