Digital Photo Relics

nobody@vox.com(jkottke) — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 17:11:54 -0400

What's the oldest digital camera photo you have on your computer? When is it from? Let's see it!

Great question. Here's the one from the oldest group I can find on my hard drive:

This is a photo of Michael Sippey taken on June 27, 1998 at a bar where a bunch of us were hanging out after attending the Web98 conference in San Francisco. This Q actually dovetails nicely into the previous QotD because this was the first time I met a bunch of people I knew online for the first time and, wow, was that ever an overwhelming and pleasant experience.

But back to the photo. I'm not usually a gadget early adopter type of person, but I was the first person I knew with a digital camera. I have photos on a hard drive or Jaz disk somewhere from even earlier than the above photo (I think I bought the camera in 3/98). The camera was a Nikon CoolPix 300 which cost $650, had 4Mb of internal memory, could record sound, had a stylus for taking notes (no grafitti or anything like that, just straight up scribbling), used a touch screen for menu navigation, took the world's crappiest 640x480 photos, and was generally a big pain in the ass to use. My current telephone takes better photos than that thing did. The whole ordeal put me off both early adoption and hybrid devices for quite a long time.

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Digital Photo Relics