Digital Artefacts

-


We've all heard of Photoshop, right? Even those who have never seen, let alone used the software recognise the name as the now common verbal usage of the name: to 'Photoshop' an image, meaning to edit and alter a digital photographic image to some end. Far fewer people would know just how long this raster image editing software - at first a standalone application, then a suite of software, now a full-blown subscription megalith of related media apps, available online. It's interesting to note, however, that its origins lie in the late 1980s, the brainchild of Thomas and John Knoll. Pictured are the two 1.44 MB floppy disks that contain the first version of Photoshop we ever owned, back in 1989/90. It is the LE edition and was probably bundled with a scanner of some kind.

Significantly, the application software in its entirety comes on Disc One, with Disc Two holding all the support stuff: tutorial material, documentation and manuals and such. That's the entire application program in around one megabyte of file space. To get an idea just how little data that represents these days, my phone has approximately 130,000 times as much storage space as that entire image editing program occupied back in 1990. Pictured are the two actual floppy disks, still in my possession to this day. Unfortunately, I currently don't have access to a Mac that has a floppy drive, let alone one that would run this old stuff, but it would be interesting to see if it is still installable and runs at this distance in time. A future project for a rainy day, methinks...

Comments

Post a Comment

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more