Digital, Analogue, Retro

8" Floppy Disk

    Anyone that knows me will also know that despite having had a long involvement with all things digital going back over forty years, I am a firm adherent to the Analogue World - vinyl records, real film in cameras and the rest. This doesn't mean for one minute I eschew the digital - far from it, as evidenced by this little screed-fest. But I do like both the concept and the quality of unmediated analogue representation - and - its relative permanence.
    Anyway, I started out in the digital domain in the late Seventies while working at Birmingham University. I was a photographic technician in the department of Mechanical Engineering. From the then very analogue world of the darkroom, I ventured into the brand new Microcomputer Lab on the first floor. This was a small suite housing about a dozen recently-purchased Commodore PET's, lying pretty much unused as no-one had yet worked out why the Prof had splurged on all this kit, which at the time was still fairly rare in the outside world. I taught myself to code in that room at lunchtimes, something I would return to a couple of lives and career-changes hence.
    Imagine for minute a world where no-one, except for a very few in academia or the tech business would have any access to computers at any time, let alone own one. A time when the Internet was known only to the Military & a small number of civilian institutions, as I referred to in a previous post. A time without a supercomputer/HD video-camera/telephone/GPS device in most back pockets. A time when software and media content weren't streamed to talking devices and televisions in most living rooms. A time when software was loaded into the machines of the time on 8" Floppy Disks - or Diskettes as they were often known, when entire operating systems occupied a few tens of kilobytes, rather than tens of gigabytes.
    Alongside those who have returned to analogue tech to get or produce their music or art, there is a widespread movement of retro-digitalists out there, resurrecting older digital technologies. This is not just nostalgia, although that does figure, but has a serious side - a few enthusiasts are making a business out of the need to extract otherwise inaccessible data.
    Unlike most analogue stuff, which can still be accessed and used relatively easily with a bit of application and some kit, a large number of digital file formats have been rendered effectively obsolete and unusable by changes in the hardware that we use. As I've posted elsewhere I have found photographic negatives from sixty years ago that I can easily extract usable images from, where I've got digital disks in a large number of physical formats in a large number of digital file formats, for a large number of operating systems - all obsolete and effectively unusable and all less than thirty years old. We are still reading books many hundreds of years old.
    It's fortunate that there are people out there who don't simply consume the latest tech blindly as it emerges and then bin the old stuff unquestioningly - very significant stuff gets lost this way: imagine your entire life's work as a photographer or writer or whatever; your family memories, anything you can imagine that's irreplaceable - rendered unusable or worse still, gone forever. In the digital domain, that is always an imminent possibility, analogue stuff at least needs physically destroying to make it so. So think twice before mocking the retro-loving geeks who might just be able to rescue your lost stuff.