Digital Obsolescence vs. Film Obsolescence

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Trying to keep dedicated hackers (of the old definition) out of file formats is hard. All you need is someone with enough dedication to get something out of almost any file. Well, older ones - proprietary formats with lots of backwards compatibility/complexity/encryption/intentional obfuscation won't be as trivial.

I'm a C++ programmer though, not a fortran/asm one, so I'm not really the guy you're looking for when it comes to old school file format exploration. Many of the experts there were a generation or two of programmer before me. I'm more of a systems nerd; now if you need a high performance framework to manage your plugins... ;)
 
I think "obsolete" is too strong a term to use for software. Software always does what it does. That might not be useful at some point, but it still does what it was written to do. It's just that we don't want to do that anymore

I can see a time when software and hardware upgrades include an option to convert digital files so they are au courant. I can see Adobe or Apple doing that. Install the newest Photoshop, or migrate to a new Mac, and the install routine asks you if you want to do the conversion.

One big reason that film, i.e., the entire process of using film, is obsolete or outmoded or stable and mature, depending on the point of view, is that no one seems to be working to improve that process, unlike digital.
 
15 or 20 years from now....

Film will be gone (no more silver available), digital photography too (no more indium - "A computer without indium will be as fast as a pc built 1980"). I just read an article in a magazine about our natural resources.

So in 20 years from now we might sit in front of our computers, trying to open that old 12 megapixel file from 2010 and the computer will tell us: "Opening file..... please come back in 5 days" :D
 
MRohlfing said:
15 or 20 years from now....

Film will be gone (no more silver available), digital photography too (no more indium - "A computer without indium will be as fast as a pc built 1980"). I just read an article in a magazine about our natural resources.

So in 20 years from now we might sit in front of our computers, trying to open that old 12 megapixel file from 2010 and the computer will tell us: "Opening file..... please come back in 5 days" :D
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Too funny. 4Mhz Z80a, CP/m. Two 320Kbyte floppy drives, 64K ram. That is my first Personal Computer, bought in 1981. I processed Image data with it. Using Microsoft FORTRAN and Macro for CP/m. I still have it in the basement. Fired it up a few years ago when I needed a software Divide routine for an embedded processor, ported it from Z80 assembly to MIPS assembly. Nice thing about assembly language, all computers speak it.

Keep your DOS handy. DOS on a Pentium 4 is really fast.
 
One big reason that film, i.e., the entire process of using film, is obsolete or outmoded or stable and mature, depending on the point of view, is that no one seems to be working to improve that process, unlike digital.
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Not interested in a pointless film vs digital war (the world's big enough for both, IMHO) but you can't really make a statement like that when Kodak's done a lot of work bringing in TMY, for just one example.

Exciting stuff going on in both fields, really.
 
That CP/M computer was $2400 30 years ago and that was with a 40% employee discount. It paid for itself. My 6Mhz 80286 machine was $3500, 20MByte hard drive and 2Meg of memory, 1986. Had the Math Coprocessor. Also paid for itself, and the car. I got $35/hr writing FORTRAN in my spare time back then. My idea of "funny" was hacking Wolfenstein and putting pictures of my cats behind the jail bars and in the framed pictures. Wrote the program in FORTRAN to read out the image files, figure out the video lookup table, and replace the images of people with the cats but leave the bars and picture frames in place. No documentation on the image format- just HEX dumped the file. Roger is right, good thing I have a Kid now.

The film available today is better than ever, making sensor upgrades to film cameras easy.
 
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Colin Corneau said:
Not interested in a pointless film vs digital war (the world's big enough for both, IMHO) but you can't really make a statement like that when Kodak's done a lot of work bringing in TMY, for just one example.

Exciting stuff going on in both fields, really.
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And more promised for photokina...

Cheers,

R.
 
Brian Sweeney said:
That CP/M computer was $2400 30 years ago and that was with a 40% employee discount. It paid for itself. My 6Mhz 80286 machine was $3500, 20MByte hard drive and 2Meg of memory, 1986. Had the Math Coprocessor. Also paid for itself, and the car. I got $35/hr writing FORTRAN in my spare time back then. My idea of "funny" was hacking Wolfenstein and putting pictures of my cats behind the jail bars and in the framed pictures. Wrote the program in FORTRAN to read out the image files, figure out the video lookup table, and replace the images of people with the cats but leave the bars and picture frames in place. No documentation on the image format- just HEX dumped the file. Roger is right, good thing I have a Kid now.

The film available today is better than ever, making sensor upgrades to film cameras easy.
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Dear Brian,

My first personal computer (c. 1985) didn't even have a hard drive. Two five-and-a-quarter floppies at something crazy like 160 Kb each. OK for Wordstar. And it was £1600.

Mind you, the first word processor I used was a dual ICL 2903 in the late 70s or early 80s. As I recall it cost £3,000,000, but I wasn't paying. In those days, plenty still remembered Mercury Autocode, and one of my old chums from the fencing club in the early 80s recalled problems with leaks in the mercury delay lines a couple of decades before. He described the £1600 computer above as 'a beautifully made, 16-wheeler, half-ton delivery truck'. In my field, it was more of a COBOL environment in those days, shading to BASIC.

Yes, it paid for itself. But it was a hell of a learning curve after a Remington Noiseless.

Cheers,

R.
 
Brian Sweeney said:
If documentation exists on the file format, you can always get someone to write some code. These formats are not hard to unpack. My wife faced a similar problem about 14 years ago with some medical images stored in TIFF format, produced with a 1MPixel microscope camera- fairly advanced for its time. It was fairly easy to write a FORTRAN/Assembly program to unpack them and save in a new format. ".BMP" format is common, and very easy to generate.
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I'd do it myself but I didn't have much data in those formats (I wasn't a total fool; the important stuff was all in .tiff archives) was so important that *had* to convert it to other formats.
 
Brian Sweeney said:
My idea of "funny" was hacking Wolfenstein and putting pictures of my cats behind the jail bars and in the framed pictures.
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That still is funny, Brian. (When I was a kid I actually wrote a "hello world" level program on an Apple I (ONE; that is not an error), and I learned to program in Pascal and BASIC on an Apple II. Good times.
 
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