Meanderings in Blogland

After my days at Palmer’s Camera in Berkeley, I moved to Mendocino and [tried to] make a living as a photographer/custom photo printer. This was in ye olde days of the mid 1990s, and photo printing still involved a wet darkroom. I had pretty much the only custom color darkroom in the area, so I had a viable, if weird, little market niche. Doing my own printing was also an advantage when it came to selling my nature photography.

I enrolled in a desktop publishing class at my friendly neighborhood community college (CRMC, College of the Redwoods, Mendocino Coast). My immediate goal was to learn how to make brochures to promote my little business. Pagemaker led inevitably to PhotoShop, and PhotoShop led in several directions at once, changing my business and my entire life.

Compared to the abomination I’d used at Palmer’s, the Windows 95 machines at CRMC seemed positively sci-fi in their sophistication, at least they did when we were just running Pagemaker. During my second semester at CRMC, we tackled PhotoShop, and the consumer-grade Windows machines proved laughably inadequate. This was version 3 of PhotoShop, without RAM-snarfing features like layers.

After a few weeks of banging our heads into the wall trying to use PhotoShop on machines that crashed every few minutes, our class moved to the graphics lab, where we had more sophisticated computers with a then-whopping 128MB of RAM.  The graphics lab also offered another improvement: it had Macs in addition to Stupid Windows Machines.

It didn’t take me long to switch to the Macs. Not only did they out perform the SWMs, but they were less in demand. Most of the other students had SWMs at home, so they didn’t want to clutter up their brains by learning a different operating system. So I could always get a Mac while others were duking it out over the SWMs.

Digital photo technology was in a weird state at that point in space and time. I didn’t even want a digital camera then. The ones I had used took pictures that were unsharp and toooo contrasty. Furthermore, they had very bad layout of the controls. The shooter had to navigate through dozens of bells and whistles to get to the useful features. Even if I did want one, they were frightfully expensive, and I was financially challenged.

Scanning film images was another option, but film scanners were exotic, expensive, cantankerous contraptions back then. Print scanners were good, but you needed a good print to scan. Since I had my own darkroom, that wasn’t a problem for me. For several years, my photo workflow involved making a 7×10ish print in the darkroom and scanning it.

Once you had a digital image file to work with, adjusting or manipulating it in PhotoShop was easy and fun. While PS has continued to improve since then, it was already fabulous. Its abilities to adjust  brightness, contrast, and color locally or throughout an image were already far beyond anything I could have fantasized about in the wet darkroom.

But, once the image files were adjusted/manipulated, I still had to print them. CRMC had pretty typical inkjet printers for the time. They produced prints which were vibrant, saturated, surreal, and ephemeral. Their hyper-saturation was OK for some graphic design projects, where vibrancy was more important than accuracy, but for landscapes the hyper-fluorescent saturation was unacceptable. But then, the prints only lasted a few months before the colors turned to goo, so they were useless for fine art photography anyway.

After my brief flirtation with a Computer Science major, I plunged headlong into impractical artsy-fartsiness, and wound up with a degree in Dramatic Art. For twenty-some years, I had very little contact with computers. Somehow, technology managed to continue stampeding without me.

I caught a few glimpses of the herd along the way. It wasn’t always pretty. For a couple of years I worked for The Nature Company, when they were a relatively small business with a few stores around the SF Bay Area. Legend has it that the owner met somebody at a party who sold claimed he could painlessly set up a computer system which would track the inventory and ordering for the whole enterprise. We wound up with a woefully inadequate system which was a nightmare for all involved.

I worked in the warehouse, receiving books from the publishers and sending them to the stores. Before the computer, we had a paper-based inventory system which worked pretty well. As the computer system started up (in 1985), we wound up with two separate systems at the same time: the old system, and the computer data sheets. We didn’t get computers or terminals at our work stations, that would have been too expensive. Instead, in addition to a whole new set of paperwork, we had to individually mark each book with the price and a sku number. Since most books came with pre-printed prices, they didn’t need to be marked at all before. That was a lot of extra work. The new computer sheets went to the computer people while the rest of us used the old system.

During my tenure there, I saw no sign that the computer system might possibly ever work. From my perspective, it was just a lot of extra stupid work with no discernable benefit.

Later, I had another experience computerizing a retail store’s inventory system. This was at Palmer’s Camera in Berkeley. This was technically a simpler project—it was only one store—and technology had had another eight years or so to stampede along. This time, the technology sorta kinda worked.

I checked Google, and sure enough, the company that produced the software, The General Store, is still in business. It’s been many years, and TGS has no doubt improved through many versions. I assume/hope the TGS of 1992  bears little or no resemblance to the TGS of 2008.

TGS was the first time I had intimate congress with a database. I was doing all of the receiving and a good chunk of the purchasing for Palmer’s at the time, so I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the new system. We did get it to work well enough that it started to save work time, but it was a struggle. Part of the struggle was with TGS, part of it was with our own budget, and part of it was with technophobic staff members.

One of the TGS problems was that it couldn’t handle some of the complexities of our ordering. There were hundreds of items we got from more than one supplier, often at different prices. There were hundreds of items for which we got case lot discounts when we ordered in even case lots. There were other items for which we got discounts when we ordered more than a certain minimum number. TGS couldn’t handle the variables and never gave reliable wholsale amounts for our orders. If I needed to now, I could create a database system that could handle all of those variables, but it would be a pretty big job.

The basic relational database structure has been around since the late 1960s, and even with several thousand widgets to track, a system like this wouldn’t require all that much computing power. The computers and software of the day should have been able to work better than this—in fact, they could—but we had the econo models of both hard- and software.

In 1979, I moved to Berkeley and began attending school there. I was originally planning to major in astronomy, since I thought Carl Sagan was cool and it was fun to tell people I was going to be an astrophysicist. It seemed like a good idea to have a fall-back; a possible major that actually included job skills. So I took some classes in Computer Science.

I learned to write programs using Fortran IV. I don’t remember what the programs did, but I remember long hours of typing punch cards. When we were done, we’d hand the stack of cards to an operator. An hour or so later we’d get a printout with the results of the run. No program ever worked the first time, so we’d try to fix the problem, punch some more cards, lather, rinse, repeat.

The mainframe which used punch cards was old even in 1979. The next semester we moved on to Pascal and a Unix system with actual CRT terminals. This was the first sytem I used which bore a resemblance to a modern computer. It could process words. It had a system-wide proto-email capability. The terminals looked sorta like modern computers.

One of the interesting things about comparing technology then and now is just how bad the prognosticators were. I clearly recall one of my professors saying “we’ve made great strides in recent years in storing more and more information in less and less space, but we shouldn’t expect that trend to continue. We’re running into real physical limits.” Yup, sure enough, a 5-1/2 inch floppy disc with a capacity of 110KB is still state of the art. Yessiree.

The newer, more powerful computers were going to usher in a new era of artificial intelligence. Previously intractable computing problems were going to be solved very soon. We were going to have robots which walked gracefully on two legs, could play catch, could speak and understand natural languages, and could recognize faces. Alas, the intractable problems of artificial intelligence remain pretty much intractable, although Big Brother uses the latest facial recognition software to find people who look sorta kinda like bad guys so they can ship them off to Egypt to get tortured. Progress. Not always good.

This chapter of the Great Historic Epic of our Generation will be brief. While technology was stampeding away during the late seventies, I had relatively little contact with it. Due to forces beyond my control, I found myself attending high school in Wayne, Nebraska. I remember this as more the era of the calculator rather than the computer. I think my high school had some computers, but they were used in the business classes, and I didn’t take any business classes. During this period I bought a programmable calculator, a big wow at the time. It had functions for trigonometry and logarithms plus a fifty step program memory.

One of my high school classes took a field trip to the big mainframe at the local college. There I had my first contact with computer proto-graphics. I got to type my name onto a punch card, which was fed into the computer. It spat out GARTH in giant letters, with each of the giant letters composed of carefully arranged small versions of the same letter, so the great big G was composed af a bunch of little Gs. As crude and primitive as that sounds, it was impressive, way-cool stuff at the time.

I thought it might be interesting to somebody-somewhere-somewhen if I were to assemble a series of anecdotes on the theme of my encounters with the rising tide of computer technology. I wrote my first computer program about 34 years ago. It would be a wee little understatement to say that things have changed a lot in over that span of time.

In 1974 (give or take a year) I was enrolled in an electronics class at Roosevelt Junior High in Eugene, OR. Our school district was on the cutting edge of the newfangled computer technology: it had a computer. One building-filling mainframe for the whole district. Wow.

Our school had a terminal which connected to the mainframe. It looked like an old news teletype machine. You typed your query, and the computer typed its reply. There was no monitor; the whole exchange was printed. Our electronics class got to use the monitor a few times for our programming projects. I recall writing a program (in BASIC) which asked for the radius of a circle, then calculated the area of that circle. Mighty complicated stuff, but that state-of-the-art machine could handle it. The machine also had a few games. We didn’t get to play them much, as computer time was severely precious and limited, but I remember a football game where you typed in the play you want to run, and the computer typed the results of the play and the down and yardage.

We also made a field trip to the building housing the mainframe. We got to ooh and ah at the flashing lights and big reels of magnetic tape. The guy leading our tour said something like: “I don’t know what many of these lights mean, but I know that this one means that the processor is idle at the moment.” Even with all of the action from all of the schools in the district, that light was on quite a bit, probably a third of the time.