had a roommate with a badassed 16mm that used to be his uncles or something. 3 lenses on the turret, longer run-time (spring wound) and overall design than my school’s cameras. I shot all my projects for my film class on it since it was a 16mm class but their cameras were so basic and you had to check them out and return them. My roommate just showed up one day with this awesome camera while I was in the class, it was like deus-ex-machina–a literal godsend machine. Most consumer-grade cameras were 8mm or Super8, that his uncle had 16 was astronomical odds. And yes, I did some frame-by-frame. Not animation but time-lapse.
Found it:
the little lenses are for the viewfinder. same aspect ratio as the real lens that goes to the shutter.
OK, I liked your post. But I do NOT miss those. Just like I don’t miss zip disks. Or people showing up with random media, random file types from no name applications, no fonts whatsoever, and expecting me to somehow make that into a printed brochure or whatever. Gah.
ZIP was better than floppy, that’s true, at least until the ka-chunk-chunk noises started, then it was a mad race to copy everything before it died. That might have happened to me only once or twice, but the panic set the memory in my brain indelibly.
I remember the first time I made a flyer on a friend’s computer, agonizing about font-choice and getting them kerned and sized exactly how I wanted for hours. Saved the file (Pagemaker?) to disc and went to Kinkos. None of those fonts were on the Kinkos computer. My beautiful flyers looked generic af, the bands were like “I thought you said you could make cool stuff?” Learned to copy all my fonts to disc in the future, at least.
yeah, i can STILL hear that ka-CHUNK sound of death in my head, haha. but at least it was a warning sound – a floppy could die and become unreadable with no apparent warning whatsoever, and it was awful living in that sort of fear.
Pagemaker does make me a little nostalgic, actually. It was my first layout and design program, back when it was Aldus Pagemaker. I ended up being newspaper and yearbook editor in high school, because no one else wanted to learn Pagemaker. They asked for volunteers who could do it. No takers. So they asked for someone who was willing to learn it, and I was the only one in the class who raised their hand. My thought was literally, how exciting to learn how to use a Macintosh. It was 1989, and they were brand new. Man, I am pretty darn nostalgic now. Damn.
I recall using one of the university’s stash of Macintoshes to do some drawings in about 1986. When I tried to print it didn’t work. I was told I needed to use a machine with an OS upgrade. I recall the help tech saying “See this pixel between these two lines? If it’s black it’s the newer OS.”
At that point, the universe divided, and I refused to ever get a Mac. Clearly Steve Jobs didn’t want you knowing anything about computers. (Well, I caved, sort of. I do have an iPhone and iPad. Oh well.)
Oh – not having a button to eject a diskette pissed me off too. Who carries a paperclip to the computer lab??
There was a firmware fault in one of our floppy r/w drives so that periodically a floppy didn’t just not format properly, it was damaged beyond repair. It took a month to get fixed and while this was happening periodically there would be a burst of profanity followed by an 8 inch Frisbee being sent across the lab to crash into the power supply racks.
You know, I really don’t recall – I just have an image of something of two lines on the screen. The upper two lines (under a heading or title or something? Or a box around a title?) were on the old OS, while the lower two lines were on the updated OS. You can see a slight widening of the left edge. Sorry! That’s all I can remember.
I do NOT miss choking on ammonia even a tiny bit. Can’t say I really miss coming home with India ink all over my hands everyday because that was the easiest way to keep the ink flowing through the 0, 00 and 000 pens.
In my senior year in high school, the school library had a project to modernize their catalog. It involved student volunteers (like me) manually entering card catalogs into a database on an Apple II GS.
hmmm I wonder if that indicates something.
