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Misleading title. He didn't "develop" 120-year-old latent images. This was a developed, stable negative from which he made positive prints. What's interesting
by fortran77 3y ago
Misleading title. He didn't "develop" 120-year-old latent images. This was a developed, stable negative from which he made positive prints.
What's interesting is that 120-year-old image formats, in the form of a photographic negative, can still be read today. Can we feel confident that an Apple HEIC sitting inside an iPhone can be read 120 years from now?
That's why every year I take 50 or so photos and get them printed and bound in a photobook. (There are many vendors that do this, and it's not that expensive.)
- worrycue 3y ago> Can we feel confident that an Apple HEIC sitting inside an iPhone can be read 120 years from now? The photos are trivial to copy though and will likely be preserved, if the owner chooses to do so, by being replicated across multiple storage devices over time.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's making a lot of assumptions.
- firecall 3y agoWe don't need to, and nor should we, save every photo that everyone has ever take on their smartphone. Thats madness... :-) Sometimes things get lost and destroyed, and thats OK.
- worrycue 3y agoCompanies like Apple kind of do it for you as you upgrade from iPhone to iPhone and data from your old phone is transferred to the new one.
- b112 3y agoIn 120 years, no one may have heard of Apple.
- pcdoodle 3y agoWe already have 40+ year old apple machines that the vintage community are preserving / keeping in operation / archiving software.
- b112 3y agoApple could go bankrupt in 30 years, and 30 years after that, only a tiny smattering of historians might known of it. What would be known 60 years later? Nothing is certain.
- pcdoodle 3y agoI doubt it. They created the industry milestone products. People like driving vintage cars, operating vintage computers and playing vintage games. These formats aren't going anywhere.
- b112 3y agoHow many people restore old carriages, and use horses to get around? How many people know the manufacturer's names for those carriages? Sure historians will know, which is a bit of what antique collectors are. But in 120 years? People won't have a clue what Apple was. In the course of 100+ years, Apple is not important. It had about 15 years of groundbreaking change, now it has none. And to be fair on that, the computing market is fairly mature now. Their latest AR gambit seems interesting, but it hardly revolutionary. Look at Rolex watches. They were the pinnacle of innovation in their sector, and a must have for anyone even mildly well to do. Sort of like Apple. They're basically gone now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- firecall 3y ago> Can we feel confident that an Apple HEIC sitting inside an iPhone can be read 120 years from now? As long as we are still on the same technological path, then yes, we can be confident. Chemistry and lenses are a form a technology, such as required by developing and printing photographs. They couldn't be sure that when they invented Photography that people 120 years in the future would be able to work with the negatives. Certainly people could view prints if they hadnt faded into nothing, but developing or projecting prints from negatives requires a certain level of technology. Many negatives from the early days of film and photography have just disintegrated and are gone forever. Yes, modern prints are more durable, but they don't last forever. Old processes for analog and digital technologies are often rediscovered. I'm optimistic :-) Having said that, digital archive projects are tremendously important to preserving our history.