I did my shooting today with the little Olympus [mju:]. The Great Point&Shoot Adventure continues. Trouble is, I can’t connect it to the computer. So, I might have some great shots. Or total garbage. That’s one of the joys of film. The magic moment when you finally get to see the pictures. But digital photography has in five years all but wiped out the 35mm camera. That couldn’t have happened without the computer technology that goes with it. When I bought my first SLR, (screw mount lens mount and stop-down metering) there was no such thing as a home computer. By the time I bought my second SLR (aperture priority auto) the computer to have was the BBC Model B. An 8 bit 6502 processor running at a scorching 2khz, 32 Mb of RAM and an optional 5.25” floppy drive, it could do anything you asked of it. Or so we thought! Around that time I wrote a college dissertation on computer graphics and confidently predicted digital photography. Not only that, but I also stated that Canon would be a leader in this new technology. The EOS system was still 6 years away and the camera to have was the Canon A1. I can remember seeing photographs displayed on a computer screen for the the first time. It was on the monochrome green screen of the new ACT Sirius 1, an awesome new machine with a 16 bit processor! Too bad the IBM PC came along and killed it! Some 22 years later, I can carry this 32bit 800Mhz / 640Mb machine with it’s millions of colours on to a Boeing 747 as hand luggage and no one bats an eyelid. Imagine trying that in the early 80’s with your BBC micro, a 14” portable television, the disk drive unit and the 40,000 or so floppy disks you’d need to equal the hard drive on the iBook. The photographs I took on our brief US tour alone would use 1,000 of those old floppies. And don’t think I’m boasting about some cutting edge machine I have here. My iBook had a fairly modest spec when I bought it 18 months ago. I could go out today and buy a machine with twice the performance. Yet we’re now so used to the power of modern computers that you constantly hear people saying that this or that machine / operating system / application is rubbish, or that this or that camera sucks. Just turn around and look what we had just a few years ago. This modern stuff is just amazing. Even if there is still no digital equivalent of my little [mju:]-ii!