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░                         ░░                                  11.19 volume 1  ░
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                            Don't Copy that Floppy                           ░
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  I took an interest in floppy disks a few months back and started buying    ░
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  up lots of them at auction. Like VHS tapes or other older media, their     ░
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  contents are typically time-gated to the start of their manufacture until  ░
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  a bit after they went out of style.                                        ░
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  For the 3.5" floppy disks I've been purchasing, that range is roughly      ░
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  the early-mid 80s, with Apple's 1984 Mac line being their first to         ░
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  feature a 3.5" drive, until the mid aughts - a few years after the rise    ░
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  of the CD-R.                                                               ░
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  A bit before the release of the floppy-less iMac in 1998, a major shift    ░
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  in photography began to take place. Consumer-grade digital cameras         ░
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  started gaining in popularity around 1995 and by the mid aughts cell       ░
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  phones with cameras had become fairly common.                              ░
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                                                                             ░
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 Most 3.5" floppies around this time held 1.44mb. Not much by today's       ░
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standards, but then the Epson PhotoPC-a digital camera released in 1995-   ░
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  took 0.3 megapixel photos and could store up to 16 of them in on its 1mb   ░
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  internal storage.                                                          ░
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Harsh storage limits and the relative fragility of the media mean that     ░
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  not very much remains from these very early days of digital photography.   ░
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Significant portions of the disks that I purchased with promising labels   ░
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had either been overwritten with other media, usually device drivers, or   ░
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were unreadable by any of my 3 floppy disk drives. That, combined with     ░
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a majority of sellers offering only blind auctions, has made finding       ░
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material difficult.                                                        ░
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What I have found so far is representative of how I remember early         ░
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digital photos feeling. They have a quality that is difficult for me to    ░
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explain, but I'll try.                                                     ░
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I don't know if anyone thought of it this way at the time, but what makes  ░
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sense to me in retrospect is that cameras up to this point had some        ░
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immediate and permanent result. Whether that was a negative on film or     ░
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the instant one-off output of a Polaroid, a subject knew that some         ░
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permanent material output was being made of them in the moment of the      ░
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photograph being taken.                                                    ░
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Digital photography, particularly early digital cameras which lacked any   ░
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preview screen, just stored their results as a bunch of electricity in     ░
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a container that you couldn't even access without a cable and a computer.  ░
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                                                                             ░
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Things feel candid even when the subject is obviously aware that a photo   ░
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is being taken because that photo is, somehow, not a photo.                ░
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I have had a lot of fun finding and curating these images so far, and I    ░
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hope you enjoy seeing them. I hope to continue this series with more than  ░
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just photos. I've found some interesting text documents as well and will   ░
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likely incorporate them in future issues.                                  ░
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