Ok, this is going to make me appear very old: I once was blown away by the fact that it is possible to send a photograph to a different state in under 24 hours. Sarah and I were going to a wedding. And I had bought a pair of pants, shoes, and shirt for the occasion. But I wasn’t sure if the outfit I had picked out was going to cut it. I needed Sarah to sign off on my outfit.
The problem was that I was living in Tucson, Arizona at the time and Sarah was living in Boulder, Colorado.
You young wipper snappers are probably thinking “So? Why didn’t you just use skype? Or google hangouts? Facetime? Facebook Messenger? Or any other video call app?”
The problem is that this was 2003 and none of those technologies existed back then. Smart phones hadn’t even been invented yet. Almost nobody had a digital camera. I didn’t have one until late in 2006.
So this is how I did it. I loaded a roll of Fuji Superia 200 into my super slick Canon Canonet QL 17 and mounted it on a tripod. It was in the evening and pretty dark in my room and the sensitivity of film is such that it would not have been possible to take a picture with just the ceiling light. Thank god I also had the flash unit for the QL 17 and a pair of AA batteries. So I filled the roll of 24 frames striking poses in front of the tripod mounted camera. Then I went to sleep. There was nothing else I could do that night.
Next morning I stopped at the photo store just off the University of Arizona campus on my way to work. They were offering one hour film development. And the kicker was that they had the ability to scan your film into a computer and make a CD with jpgs. How crazy was that? Of course you had to pay extra for that. But anyways I dropped off the film and went to work.
Then, at lunch time, I stopped at the photo shop to pick up the developed film and the CD with jpgs. In our office (the old room 300 actually, aka the room that does not exist, aka the Gedankenlab) we had a workstation that had a CD drive. I popped in the CD and used some command line tool (forgot its name) to look at the pictures one by one. I picked one and copied it to my home directory. That’s right, just one. At a resolution of a little over 1 megapixel the pictures were several 100 kilobyte in size. That was huge and there was no way to send much more than that to Sarah. Flicker, picasa or any picture posting site like that also didn’t exist yet.
Once I had the picture in my NFS mounted home directory I could use a different computer from which we had internet access to email the picture to Sarah. I then called her lab (landline!) to let her know that I had sent that email to her. In those days you were offline by default. High tech folks like us checked email maybe a few times a day. But you had to actively go and log in somewhere.
From taking the pictures to her giving the thumbs up on my outfit it only took about 15 hours. Magic!