The reverse digital revolution is at hand

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Published: Saturday, January 23rd, 2016 @ 4:58 am
By: Bobby Tony ( More Entries )

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Centuries from now or maybe just a few years from now, some forensic archaeologist will be digging through our history and conclude we did not know how to read and write. That is because everything will be preserved in digital content.

A greatly simplified explanation of a digital system is that it is nothing but a series of 0's & 1's that are arranged in sequential order and saved on a magnetic or optical medium. The classic example of analog vs digital is the variations of a clock. The clock on the left is a combination of mechanical and electrical, which provides the time in incremental format. If you lose electricity, the clock will stop at the time when the electricity was lost. The digital clock on the right will just go blank if it does not have a backup power source. When electricity is restored, the clock on the left will begin the count again from the last time. The one on the right will restart from "a null value" which is use to be 00:00. Later digital clocks will blink at 12:00 to show there was a power loss. In both cases you will not know the current time. More recent clocks will have a 9 volt battery back up to maintain time for a short period.

What has all this to do with anything or who really cares? Well, for the last few years I have spent quite a bit of time scanning old family photographs from the drug store copies to a digital format on the computer. There are many advantages to a digital copy over photo prints. It can be enhanced or edited on a computer. It can be transmitted over the internet or email. Generally, you can keep the high quality if you save the raw or original picture and use a copy for editing and sharing.

Since about 2000, I have been taking pictures with a digital camera and those pictures are generally better quality than the old family Instamatic or Brownie camera. The big disadvantage is that there is no hard copy of the picture to view without some electronic device.

My most cherished picture as it appeared after the hard disk crash.
Stick with me here and imagine that you have your entire collection of your fifteen year old on your computer and your computer crashes. After a trip to the local computer store for repair, you find that the hard disk is damaged beyond recovery. The current phrase for that situation is that the hard disk has suffered a "HILLARY WIPE". It may be possible to recover the data and pictures but it will be very expensive and time consuming and there is no guarantee that you will ever get back the great picture of your naked wife 40 pounds ago.

For that reason, I have recently been reviewing all my "born digital" pictures and sending them to Snapfish to have hard copies made for the permanent file. This is my version of Digital Preservation which has some historians very concerned with our digital bread crumbs trail in the last 40 years or so. My point is simple. If you have some pictures on your computer that you want to preserve, you might want to send the files out to have hard copies made.