Tag Archives: nostalgia

Photography

Keep Those Old Photos

google-search-photos

Chances are that when you are feeling sentimental or nostalgic you’ll head straight for the old photographs. If you’ve had the misfortune of being swept up in a natural or accidental disaster — fire, flood, hurricane — it’s likely that  the objects you seek out first  or miss the most while be your photographs. Those of us over the age of 35 may still have physical albums or piles of ancient images stored in shoeboxes or biscuit tins. And, like younger generations, we’ll also have countless pictures stored on our smartphones or computers or a third party internet service like Instagram or Pinterest — organized or not. We hold on to our physical and digital images because they carry meaning and store our connections. A timely article from Wired’s editor reminds us to keep even the bad ones.

From Wired:

The past 12 months sucked. Over that span I lost my grandmother, a childhood friend, and a colleague. Grief is a weak spring; if there’s not enough time between blows, you don’t bounce back. You just keep getting pushed down. Soon even a minor bummer could conjure deep sadness. I took comfort in photos: some dug out of boxes but most unearthed online.

One particularly low evening, I sat on the couch reading my departed friend’s blog. I’d read it before—beginning to end, a river that spanned years and documented her battle with illness. This time I just scanned for images. I sat there frozen. My wet face locked into the glow-cone of my laptop, captivated by an unexpected solace: candid photos.

The posed pictures didn’t do it for me; they felt like someone else, effigies at best. But in the side shots and reflections, the thumbnail in a screencapped FaceTime chat, I felt like I was really seeing her. It was as if those frames contained a forever-spark of her life.

“A posed image can never be the same as when someone’s guard is down.” So said Costa Sakellariou, a photography professor at Binghamton University whose course I took the summer of my second junior year. I enrolled in it to make up credits that I was too busy getting wasted to accrue during the regular academic year (helluva student, this guy), but the experience ended up being really important to me.

Costa would have us use manual film cameras for street photography. We’d set our aperture to a daylight-friendly f/16, prefocus at 3 feet, then go downtown to ambush pedestrians. “A candid photograph captures the intersections of life,” he’d say. Well, he said something like that back then, but he said exactly that when I called him to talk for the first time in 15 years.

He’s still at Binghamton, his students still shoot film (mostly), and he’s not super-sanguine about the direction photography is taking. It’s too controlled, too curated, too conceptual. “People have chosen to abandon the random elements,” he says. If you look at your Instagram feed, you’ll see he’s right. Though photos on ephemeral platforms like Snapchat are less carefully constructed, the Internet’s permanent record is full of poses and setups.

This got me thinking about my photographic legacy. I post about a half-dozen pics a week—mostly on Instagram, mostly staged. When I’m gone, my survivors will only know the artful shots of motorcycles, fourth-take selfies with my wife, scenic vistas, and the #dogsofwired.

Read the entire story here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

Technica

An Ode to the Sinclair ZX81

Sinclair-ZX81What do the PDP-11, Commodore PET, APPLE II and Sinclair’s ZX81 have in common? And, more importantly, for anyone under the age of 35, what on earth are they?  Well, these are respectively, the first time-share mainframe, first personal computer, first Apple computer, and the first home-based computer programmed by theDiagonal’s friendly editor back in the pioneering days of computation.

The article below on technological nostalgia pushed the recall button, bringing back vivid memories of dot matrix printers, FORTRAN, large floppy diskettes (5 1/4 inch), reel-to-reel tape storage, and the 1Kb of programmable memory on the ZX81. In fact, despite the tremendous and now laughable limitations of the ZX81 — one had to save and load programs via a tape cassette — programming the device at home was a true revelation.

Some would go so far as to say that the first computer is very much like the first kiss or the first date. Well, not so. But fun nonetheless, and responsible for much in the way of future career paths.

From ars technica:

Being a bunch of technology journalists who make our living on the Web, we at Ars all have a fairly intimate relationship with computers dating back to our childhood—even if for some of us, that childhood is a bit more distant than others. And our technological careers and interests are at least partially shaped by the devices we started with.

So when Cyborgology’s David Banks recently offered up an autobiography of himself based on the computing devices he grew up with, it started a conversation among us about our first computing experiences. And being the most (chronologically) senior of Ars’ senior editors, the lot fell to me to pull these recollections together—since, in theory, I have the longest view of the bunch.

Considering the first computer I used was a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-10, that theory is probably correct.

The DEC PDP-10 and DECWriter II Terminal

In 1979, I was a high school sophomore at Longwood High School in Middle Island, New York, just a short distance from the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Labs. And it was at Longwood that I got the first opportunity to learn how to code, thanks to a time-share connection we had to a DEC PDP-10 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

The computer lab at Longwood, which was run by the math department and overseen by my teacher Mr. Dennis Schultz, connected over a leased line to SUNY. It had, if I recall correctly, six LA36 DECWriter II terminals connected back to the mainframe—essentially dot-matrix printers with keyboards on them. Turn one on while the mainframe was down, and it would print over and over:

PDP-10 NOT AVAILABLE

Time at the terminals was a precious resource, so we were encouraged to write out all of our code by hand first on graph paper and then take a stack of cards over to the keypunch. This process did wonders for my handwriting. I spent an inordinate amount of time just writing BASIC and FORTRAN code in block letters on graph-paper notebooks.

One of my first fully original programs was an aerial combat program that used three-dimensional arrays to track the movement of the player’s and the programmed opponent’s airplanes as each maneuvered to get the other in its sights. Since the program output to pin-fed paper, that could be a tedious process.

At a certain point, Mr. Shultz, who had been more than tolerant of my enthusiasm, had to crack down—my code was using up more than half the school’s allotted system storage. I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been if we had video terminals.

Actually, I can imagine, because in my senior year I was introduced to the Apple II, video, and sound. The vastness of 360 kilobytes of storage and the ability to code at the keyboard were such a huge luxury after the spartan world of punch cards that I couldn’t contain myself. I soon coded a student parking pass database for my school—while also coding a Dungeons & Dragons character tracking system, complete with combat resolution and hit point tracking.

—Sean Gallagher

A printer terminal and an acoustic coupler

I never saw the computer that gave me my first computing experience, and I have little idea what it actually was. In fact, if I ever knew where it was located, I’ve since forgotten. But I do distinctly recall the gateway to it: a locked door to the left of the teacher’s desk in my high school biology lab. Fortunately, the guardian—commonly known as Mr. Dobrow—was excited about introducing some of his students to computers, and he let a number of us spend our lunch hours experimenting with the system.

And what a system it was. Behind the physical door was another gateway, this one electronic. Since the computer was located in another town, you had to dial in by modem. The modems of the day were something different entirely from what you may recall from AOL’s dialup heyday. Rather than plugging straight in to your phone line, you dialed in manually—on a rotary phone, no less—then dropped the speaker and mic carefully into two rubber receptacles spaced to accept the standard-issue hardware of the day. (And it was standard issue; AT&T was still a monopoly at the time.)

That modem was hooked into a sort of combination of line printer and keyboard. When you were entering text, the setup acted just like a typewriter. But as soon as you hit the return key, it transmitted, and the mysterious machine at the other end responded, sending characters back that were dutifully printed out by the same machine. This meant that an infinite loop would unleash a spray of paper, and it had to be terminated by hanging up the phone.

It took us a while to get to infinite loops, though. Mr. Dobrow started us off on small simulations of things like stock markets and malaria control. Eventually, we found a way to list all the programs available and discovered a Star Trek game. Photon torpedoes were deadly, but the phasers never seemed to work, so before too long one guy had the bright idea of trying to hack the game (although that wasn’t the term that we used). We were off.

—John Timmer

Read the entire article here.

Image: Sinclair ZX81. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Idea Soup

Will nostalgia destroy pop culture?

[div class=attrib]Thomas Rogers for Slate:[end-div]

Over the last decade, American culture has been overtaken by a curious, overwhelming sense of nostalgia. Everywhere you look, there seems to be some new form of revivalism going on. The charts are dominated by old-school-sounding acts like Adele and Mumford & Sons. The summer concert schedule is dominated by reunion tours. TV shows like VH1’s “I Love the 90s” allow us to endlessly rehash the catchphrases of the recent past. And, thanks to YouTube and iTunes, new forms of music and pop culture are facing increasing competition from the ever-more-accessible catalog of older acts.

In his terrific new book, “Retromania,” music writer Simon Reynolds looks at how this nostalgia obsession is playing itself out everywhere from fashion to performance art to electronic music — and comes away with a worrying prognosis. If we continue looking backward, he argues, we’ll never have transformative decades, like the 1960s, or bold movements like rock ‘n’ roll, again. If all we watch and listen to are things that we’ve seen and heard before, and revive trends that have already existed, culture becomes an inescapable feedback loop.

Salon spoke to Reynolds over the phone from Los Angeles about the importance of the 1960s, the strangeness of Mumford & Sons — and why our future could be defined by boredom.

In the book you argue that our culture has increasingly been obsessed with looking backward, and that’s a bad thing. What makes you say that?

Every day, some new snippet of news comes along that is somehow connected to reconsuming the past. Just the other day I read that the famous Redding Festival in Britain is going to be screening a 1992 Nirvana concert during their festival. These events are like cultural antimatter. They won’t be remembered 20 years from now, and the more of them there are, the more alarming it is. I can understand why people want to go to them — they’re attractive and comforting. But this nostalgia seems to have crept into everything. The other day my daughter, who is 5 years old, was at camp, and they had an ’80s day. How can my daughter even understand what that means? She said the counselors were dressed really weird.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Slate.[end-div]