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Talk about something which makes you feel old... 1

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Cars that had points and condenser. The last three guys under 40 didn't even have a clue about what I was talking about.
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My first car was a 1971 BMW 2002 that I paid $300 for in 1983 or 1984.

The gear on the distributor was a tad worn, so the points tended to bounce, and it ate condensers at an alarming rate.

The nice Bosch mechanical advance distributor was almost as much as I paid for the car, but condensers were cheap, so I had a few in the glovebox at all times.

When the engine started running poorly it was time to change the condenser. Got so that I could do it in about 2 minutes.
 
I fear for the future as far as photos go.

When my grandparents (and their generation) died, they left behind loads of photographs, many of them annotated, many of them mounted in albums.

When my father died, my Mum and I knew he'd been filming, photographing and digitising like crazy during the last months of his life, but he left no instructions - the end came sooner than he had planned. So we found a range of computer bits in amongst boxes of wires and strange plugs. I have no idea where some of his archives are and whether they'll ever be compatible with the day's equipment if/when I find them.

Give me a box of dusty fading prints any day.

- Steve

LinkedIn
 
I sort of understand what you mean. My last winters project (a year ago) was to go through a bunch of old negatives which I had found 10 years earlier when my mother died, but had not gotten around to sorting them out. Now that I was caught-up with my photos (scanning the last of my slides and negatives) I decided to tackle the couple hundred negatives (these were all from roll-film cameras some 127 size as well as 620 and 120). It was all B&W most taken probably by my mother and father, but some went way back to before the war (WWII). In fact some went back to the 20's. I found what I'm positive is a picture of MY father taken in 1923 when he was only 3 years old, being held by HIS father in front of my grandfather's car (you can see the date on license plates). The nearly 90 year old negative was as good as new (properly developed, B&W negatives will last virtually forever, which unfortunately was rarely the case with color negatives or slides, with the possible exception of Kodachrome slides, which are also permanent, if proper care is taken).

Grandpa_Dad_1923.jpg


Yep, you kind of wonder whether your great-grandchildren will be able to look at pictures of their grandfather holding their father 90 years after the digital image was captured.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
 
JohnRBaker,

I am an old movie buff. I am recalling stuff I read about the old movies, but this should apply to commercial film.

Old film stock was nitrate based. It has a half life of forty years, and it is extremely inflammable. 90% of all the movies shot during the silent era are now gone forever, due to deterioration, people not caring, and some fires in studio vaults. Note how the later Kodak black and white film is called Safety Film.

Your film probably survived because it was stored in a cool, dark place by people who wanted it to survive.

My dad was a photographer for a Toronto newspaper. He has a lot of film in 120 (2-1/4") format, and he has stuff in the large, newspaper camera format. I think this is around 5"x3". I do not have the camera in front of me. My slide scanner cannot scan this stuff. I may have to go out and find an enlarger.

Critter.gif
JHG
 
You can get some pretty inexpensive scanners which will handle at least 120/620 size negatives. I have a fairly new Epson 4490 flatbed scanner which has an option to scan film strips up to 3.25inch/80mm wide and it has worked great. It cost me around $100 a couple of years ago. For 35mm negatives and slides (as well as APS) I use a Canon Canoscan FS4000US film scanner (purchased 10 years ago for $900). It scans up to 4000 dpi (actual hardware resolution), and will do 4 mounted slides, a strip of six 35mm negatives or an entire 25 frame APS cartridge in one shot.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
 
5-level paper tape, Teletype printer, and "Jingle Bells" played with the bell on the Teletype at Christmastime.

"Chad" before everybody knew what "chad" was (and not the guy on the corner with the stylishly colorful clothing)and 120 mA loops.

The lovely rhythms of a well-functioning unit.

old field guy
 
On the other hand, haven't we all come across old photos where no one seemed to know who or what the photo was of. It maybe better that there is a shelf life, of maybe some 100 years or there abouts.
 
Nurseing homes are full of those people, no one seems to know who or what they were.

After age 80 most of us just won't be able to do much. But many of us will be able to think. And that is where we are of most value.

To all things there is a season.

But just yesterday I was looking at some photos of old power plants, and one of them looks very simular to what it looks like today. However most of them looked like... Well it's better that they were torn down.
 
As one of the "darn kids!" out there (25) I'm surprised that many things mentioned here I used at one point growing up. My parents had a rotary dial phone for a long time, I remember when 1 MB was an unthinkable amount of storage space, I remember looking at old photo albums and slides. Still, a lot of this stuff is foreign to me. Not useless or uninteresting, just unused by myself. But, I thankfully never used a slide rule (technically I use a manual flight calculator when I go flying, but that's not really the same).

As for the photo, you might find it interesting that the national archive folks (if I recall correctly) do not use digital preservation for the precise reason that they don't want to have to update the archives for new formats (or generally try to keep up with updating the technology). However, for personal photographs I think having them in a digital format does two things for preservation. First, it allows us to take MANY more photographs. I think is alone makes it better than chemical photographs. Secondly most photos are stored in common formats (jpeg has been around since the early 90s) and it's unlikely that future computers will be unable to open a .jpg .bmp .tif .gif or .png in the future as they don't require any special hardware or software, they are simply a decryption algorithm for the image format. Finally, with the advent of the internet and the influx of digital storage I predict that it wont be hard to store old pictures. One just merely has to make sure that they're hosted by a reliable service or are stored on a lasting form of digital storage (hard drives will always be able to be accessed, even if you have to take it to some place that would specialize in getting data off of out-dated computer hardware).

EIT with BS in Civil/Structural engineering.
 
Oh, my bad, didn't see when the last post was. Didn't mean to revive a month old topic.

EIT with BS in Civil/Structural engineering.
 
TehMighty Pirate,
its not your bad... lot of far older posts get revived.
If the thread hasn't been closed, its still open no matter what the interval between posting.

On the other hand, on another website with poorly organised posts, I waded in replying to a new post in the thread only to realise the thread was 7 years old.

JMW
 
I was reading that in the last year sales of records (as in black disks with groves in them) has incerased about 10% over the prior year.
 
Maybe we need a list of old engineers......

I guess you are old when you know which side of the divide you are on in all those threads where some enthusiastic young engineer wants advice on how to deal with some "Senior Engineer" who is, in the opinion of the young guy, making senile mistakes.

JMW
 
I don't believe those young guys who want to replace equipment because it is old. One set we removed because of the concern of some of mecury, but it was still working at 75 years old.
So why the rush to replace them with microprocessors, which will doubtfully will last 20 years.

So jwm I resemble that remark.
 
I'm kinda in between the old and the young. I'm damned if I'm going to use the term middle-aged though. Hah!

In my industry I'm one of relatively few because there's an entire generation almost completely missing from the power generation industry: a lot of bright young folks coming through the universities, and a rapidly dwindling number of guys with grey hair, but few in between those age groups.

I have seen protection relays mounted on slate switchboards which were installed when my grandfather was my age, and they still work perfectly. I shall wait and see how many of the new electronic gizmos make it to 20 years, never mind 80 years.


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If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!
 
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