When I originally mentioned to Ned that I might be interested in doing a MATLAB Central blog, he suggested that I write a few sample posts first to see how I liked it. One of the samples I wrote was a whimsical bit about how we techie types like to "tell our age" by telling stories about what the technology was like way back when we got our start.
For example, the first computer game I ever played was a text-based "Star Trek" game on an IBM 5100.
Later on I learned to program using a teletype terminal. It connected via acoustically coupled modem to "the computer" at the county school system's administration building 15 miles away. For a high-school math project I programmed a brute force eight-queens solver using unstructured Basic with goto's and single-character variable names.
I find myself in "old fogey tales" mode this week because of the article "Digital Photography: The Power of Pixels" in the January 2011 issue of IEEE Spectrum. This fascinating article tells the history of the development and popularization of the digital camera. It starts by discussing a 100-by-100 pixel camera created in 1975 by Kodak engineer Steven Sasson. Then it fast-forwards to the early 1990s and a few not-so-successful attempts to commercialize digital photography. Then things started to accelerate fast (with an assist from the new JPEG compression standard) through the mid- to late-1990s.
Reading this article made me reflect on my graduate-school days (1986-1990). I think I was in one of the last generations of student researchers in digital image processing who had a hard time getting digital image data to work with. This was the era when almost all images that appeared in the research literature seemed to be from the same small set of images in the USC image database that was passed by mag tape from school to school. For my image compression research I spent more time than I care to remember with the "boat" and "peppers" images.
(Like every other image compression researcher at the time, I also frequently used another famous "standard" image. I don't use that one anymore.)
(The digital speech processing students also had their small number of speech samples that they worked with over and over again. I swear I had dreams about "Oak is strong and also gives shade" and "The pipe began to rust while new.")
For image display we were in good shape, because in my first year of grad school my lab got several Sun workstations with X Window graphic displays. Those were really great machines!
Disk space was a problem. One year my department won a large NSF grant for purchasing a Multiflow Trace computer. It came with a 1 GB hard drive, which we were very excited about! We thought that would certainly last us until we graduated. But then a vector quantization codebook generator gone wild filled up the disk during a single weekend.
Publishing image results in papers was a nightmare. It was very hard to get good image reproduction in journal papers (and impossible for conference papers). Getting images onto transparency for use in presentations was also an ordeal. For most of my grad school time, there was only one device (a high-end Linotype printer) at Georgia Tech that could do a good job printing digital images.
What are your own personal favorite bygone technology tales? Post them here as a comment. (They don't need to be image-related.)
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Great stories! I think your memory is better than mine because I can’t think of much to add on that subject. I do remember discovering the joys of those multiple networked Sun workstations. I could farm out my image restoration jobs all over the place. My joy was cut short, however, when I ran a job that was so big — probably a whopping 512×512 image — that Ron Schafer’s machine had to use swap memory, and he couldn’t even use the mouse pointer for minutes at a time. He didn’t seem very happy with me when he came barreling into our grad-student office. :->
I am eagerly awaiting your blog on the computer pranks we pulled on each other in grad school.
On another note, I got a kick out of the text-based Star Trek game. The funny thing I’ve observed is that I could hand a game like that to one of my kids and they would sit there playing that for hours, just as entertained as they would be with a 3D immersive game with haptic feedback! Technological advancement isn’t always progress.
Stan—My favorite prank was the one I didn’t actually pull. Remember when your image restoration program started printing out all the dates when there would be a full moon on a Friday the 13th? You were certain that I had messed with your code.
A presumption of guilt was definitely warranted! Boy, that was a strange code mishap.
Fun read, Steve. Thanks. I’ve seen Lena many times over the years, but never knew how she came to be the face of image processing. Now I know the rest of the story!
Oh, you kids. I recall my Montgomery Ward calculator replacing my slide rule.
Steve – I’ll contribute to the old fogey musings with a couple of memories.
In high school we had a PDP 8e with no internal storage, just slow paper punch tape to store your programs. But, the side benefit was unlimited confetti for football games!
Pre-Google searches were done by sending your search term to a company (DIALOG?) who would send your results as printed articles. In my first summer job using computers (1980), I was becoming very interested in graphics, so I sent in that word – “graphics”. A week later, 25 crates of bound printouts arrived at my cubicle. I hate to think how much money I wasted.
Ivan—Thanks, I got a kick out of those! We should make sure that the Google “I feel lucky; send me a printout of everything” button is disabled for you.
For more on the famous “Lena” image, see
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/
By the way, there are full-size images of her out there with the “rest” of the image.
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Lena+Soderberg+Sj%C3%B6%C3%B6blom&go=&form=QBIR&qs=n&sk=
I was at GT a bit before you, ’81-83 in Physics. I worked with a PDP8 which collected data onto paper tape and we read it into the Cyber 170. I wrote some Tektronics program to do a surface display of the data. They had a little 10″ Tek terminal in the computer center I used, (the old vector type). I never saw anyone else using it. What’s funny was there was always a line to use the terminals and I would use that display as a normal login when I needed a quick email check. I spent so much time in that terminal room the students started asking me questions like I was one of the paid lab techs.
You may have also played the multi-user star trek game on the CDC system, if it was still around when you were there. It was a text based pvp game which you had to fire torpedoes by giving a direction vector based on your relative coordinates. (As far as I can remember.)
Steve
Steve B—My undergrad time at GT (1982-1986) overlapped with you a bit. I remember the terminal room and using a line editor to create my Fortran programs.
Steve B—PS. In my senior year I was a calculus TA. One quarter someone hacked into the course roster printing system and arranged for George P. Burdell to appear as the 0th student in every class. I still have that calculus roster.
OK this may not be quite as tech related as your stories, but it is one of my memories as an undergrad Physics student at The Citadel. Our Modern Physics lab happened to be on the top floor of a building overlooking the parade grounds, a main path for other cadets coming and going. Well, after several hours of the Milikan Oil Drop experiment (fill in you favorite MP exp) we became, well, silly. Mind you, that this is the full of discipline Citadel campus. Me and the other Physics major would open the window, spy a knob(freshman) and hurl a piece of chalk at him. Knobs were not allowed to look around when in uniform so it was hilarious to watch them try to figure out where the chalk was coming from without any head rotation. Sorry for the long winded story.
In 78 our teleytype terminals were 25 miles away from the ICL mainframe in Coventry. 20minute response times to a single character input was observed. The paid techs serviced the input and output queues : card deck input could take 2 days, lineprint output could take 3 days. Handpunching your coding changes might get your deck in quicker, bypassing the wait for a cardpunch machine. Dropping your final year project was a disaster if it was done in a language like COBOL that didnt have line numbers. You were a an illuminati if you could remember the manual key-in sequence to boot the PDP from cold.