The friend I was chatting with was in New Jersey. Long distance! Precious, expensive long distance! Surely you weren't going to be calling long distance just to chat about Paul Simon. Then I went to my desk, not home to sort through a stack of albums or cds, and on this box about the size of a cigarette pack, I could pull up a song (out of over 8000! 8000 songs in this one little box! Holy cow!) Then I took my phone (not much bigger than that box of songs over there) and took a picture of the song playing! This would have blown my high school mind on a few levels:
* That music box is actually telling me what song is playing. From what album and by which artist! I don't have to listen for a while, trying to name that tune. How does it know?
* The phone has no cord. And isn't the size and weight of a brick.
* There is a camera in the phone. A camera mixed with a phone! What kind of craziness is this?
Let's talk about picture taking for a minute. Remember when you had to have film? And it was so expensive! You saved those 24 shots on that roll of film for really important stuff. And you had to use up the whole roll before you dropped it off to get developed (another expense) and wait at least a few days (overnight film development? Who am I? Rockefeller?!) Then you'd get the pictures back, hoping that you got a decent shot. Then, if you wanted to send a picture, you either had to give up the one print you have or pay for a print to be made (another expense and wait). Then you have to send it in the mail to the lucky recipient (who has, no doubt, forgotten that earlier conversation), who would look at the picture and wonder what you were wasting film on. At least postage was cheaper.
Do you realize how almost magical it is to snap a picture with a phone and send it to someone else's phone? To have thousands of songs at your fingertips? To be able to call your friend in New Jersey and not worry about how much it'll cost? It's not the future I imagined as a kid, but it's pretty incredible. And, frankly, I'd rather have the ability to carry around thousands of songs or call a friend where ever she may be, than have a jet pack.
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I'm scanning a book this week. It's 1200+ pages, tiny eensy print, two quarto sized volumes. Maybe 1000 words a page, many in Greek, loads in Latin, some Hebrew. Pages-long lists of things like churches and popes and stuff, all over the place.
I scan it one page at a time on our Plustek OpticBook (the obsolete one), very carefully because of course it was printed in 1843 and so it's a bit wiggly and fragile.
Then Imma run OCR on it, and generate a I don't know maybe 3 meg text file with all that stuff in it.
Compare the original printing, on rag paper, setting each frickin letter including foreigny stuff by hand.
Having done a little letterpress printing, among other things those dudes would have run out of letters after about four pages. "No more Es sir, we'll have to run down the street and buy some more before we finish this signature…"
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