4 ms·

It was definitely a different way to interact with the medium. Back in the early 80s I helped my mother do some genealogy research and spent many weekends in v

by evgen 8y ago

It was definitely a different way to interact with the medium. Back in the early 80s I helped my mother do some genealogy research and spent many weekends in various libraries going through obituary sections of a lot of major metro papers from 1920-1940. You quickly learned to recognize the 'shape' of the sort of page you were looking for and then would hit the advance button on the machine to spin forward until you hit something that looked like the right section. It was the sort of pattern recognition you probably do today when scrubbing through a video looking for a particular type of scene, but with pages of text. Every paper had its own style of page layout so it took an hour or two to learn what you were looking for when you switched to a different paper, but the process became fairly automatic with a bit of practice.

VLM 8y ago
Human binary search algo for page numbers, you meld with the machine and after a couple dozen hours its creepy how I could advance exactly 143 pages if I so desired by turning the dial just so; not any more surprising than video game accomplishments after a couple dozen hours. I'm a gen-x so I'm so old my youth predated even cdroms; in fact I got an off brand early cdrom reader in high school as a very expensive birthday gift. So in early high school I spent a couple weeks reading microfilm of Scientific American magazine searching out all the "amateur scientist" columns from the 50s and 60s, some real gold there. I printed out some interesting columns. Still have some of those printouts. The technology to "photocopy from microfilm" is pretty obvious optically, the image is projected onto what amounts to a xerox photocopier. Of course kids these days may not believe fully analogy photocopiers ever existed, but certainly they did, until relatively recently as digital multifunction devices took over. Around the turn of the century all the Amateur Scientist columns were combined into a multimedia cdrom using turn of the century ancient java to navigate tens of thousands of one-page-per-pdf files. I no longer have infrastructure that can run that old of a java version although hand navigation of an image of the cdrom filesystem is possible (the file names aren't too insane) and I no longer own a desktop or laptop with optical drive to read the legacy disk, although I can, for now, scare up a USB cdrom reader if needed. I lived near a depository library; did you? If you can get access to a federal depository library then you'll have access to microfilm version of complete ancient census records; I spent a long time looking at those and printing out 1800s era census records. My future wife bought "family tree maker" cdrom custom format disks of census data (this is all pre-internet pre-ancestry.com era by at least a decade). Obviously those custom cdroms of census records are useless today unless you have a complete early 90s PC emulator, and searching online works better and there's been several decades of census data released since then, LOL. I find it fascinating that I grew up before cdroms, then in my youth cdroms would replace "everything", and now cdroms are a dead media. I'm and not really all that decrepit and old outside of SV hiring standards and ageism, I scarcely have a gray hair, maybe one or two, don't even have any grand kids yet. CDroms may have been born and died in my young adult years, but there's still microfilm out there.

by evgen 8y ago

VLM 8y ago

Human binary search algo for page numbers, you meld with the machine and after a couple dozen hours its creepy how I could advance exactly 143 pages if I so desired by turning the dial just so; not any more surprising than video game accomplishments after a couple dozen hours. I'm a gen-x so I'm so old my youth predated even cdroms; in fact I got an off brand early cdrom reader in high school as a very expensive birthday gift. So in early high school I spent a couple weeks reading microfilm of Scientific American magazine searching out all the "amateur scientist" columns from the 50s and 60s, some real gold there. I printed out some interesting columns. Still have some of those printouts. The technology to "photocopy from microfilm" is pretty obvious optically, the image is projected onto what amounts to a xerox photocopier. Of course kids these days may not believe fully analogy photocopiers ever existed, but certainly they did, until relatively recently as digital multifunction devices took over. Around the turn of the century all the Amateur Scientist columns were combined into a multimedia cdrom using turn of the century ancient java to navigate tens of thousands of one-page-per-pdf files. I no longer have infrastructure that can run that old of a java version although hand navigation of an image of the cdrom filesystem is possible (the file names aren't too insane) and I no longer own a desktop or laptop with optical drive to read the legacy disk, although I can, for now, scare up a USB cdrom reader if needed. I lived near a depository library; did you? If you can get access to a federal depository library then you'll have access to microfilm version of complete ancient census records; I spent a long time looking at those and printing out 1800s era census records. My future wife bought "family tree maker" cdrom custom format disks of census data (this is all pre-internet pre-ancestry.com era by at least a decade). Obviously those custom cdroms of census records are useless today unless you have a complete early 90s PC emulator, and searching online works better and there's been several decades of census data released since then, LOL. I find it fascinating that I grew up before cdroms, then in my youth cdroms would replace "everything", and now cdroms are a dead media. I'm and not really all that decrepit and old outside of SV hiring standards and ageism, I scarcely have a gray hair, maybe one or two, don't even have any grand kids yet. CDroms may have been born and died in my young adult years, but there's still microfilm out there.