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Comment by xd | Hacker News Reader

"I think it was October or November of 1998" .. "The idea of "personal digital media" was born." .. "Before then, very vew people had any personal photos, or music, or home movies on their computers."

Wasn't this the same time digital cameras and relevant sized mass storage at affordable prices started to become common place?

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I think the most popular digital camera around that time was the the Sony Mavica FD-81. You could insert a normal 3.5" floppy disk into the camera and save pictures directly to it. Our school bought one for $900 and it was shared by the department to take pictures of stuff. The resolution on that thing was really crappy, but I guess nobody cared since our computers were equally crappy at the time. The Mavica came out around late 1998.

I doubt anyone actually owned the Sony Mavica for their own "personal" uses. It ran out of battery after 30 pictures or so, and you needed to carry around a bunch of floppies. My crappy disposable camera could take better pictures than that thing.

I'm not sure if I would consider the 3.5" floppy disk as a "relevant sized mass storage" but 1.4mb was probably pretty big in those days. When I bought windows 95, it came in 28 floppy disks.

Around 1996-97 Apple sold a digital camera, the QuickCam (and then, IIRC, the QuickCam 500). Steve killed the line when he came back, and (as someone who had access to one at work) all I can say is "good riddance".

The QuickCam was, IIRC, an 0.5 megapixel camera. It had enough on-board non-expandable memory to store 16 full-res or 32 low-res pictures, and an AppleTalk port for squirting them across to a Mac. It was a fixed-focus device with secondary viewfinder glass, no on-board LCD display, and it weighed about 0.5Kg (one of your old-school pounds). It was mostly marketed at estate agents and other professions who needed to snap shots and upload them to a computer frequently; as a consumer device it was a bit crap -- twice the cost of a cheap photo-film SLR and vastly inferior quality.

What made digital cameras practical was cheap expandability (remember when a 16Mb CF card was expensive and bleeding edge?) and digital viewfinder backs. Which didn't really arrive at a consumer-friendly price point until 1999-2000 (I remember paying £700 for a 1.4 megapixel camera with a digital viewfinder circa 1999-ish).

Which in turn tells us why iPhoto didn't come along until the turn of the millennium ...

Apple Quicktake, Logitech QuickCam. I've owned the later and have used both. In retrospect I consider it the early version of instagram. My friends and I would take pictures of ourselves goofing around and upload them to our university webpages or Geocities. All in the same day. The other option was film cameras which could take days or weeks (or years if you lost a canister).

Surely not 3.5" floppies in 1998. 1998 was the year of 100MB zip disks, LS120 supper floppies. This was when everyone already had CD-roms in their PCs and some luck people had CD-writers.

I remember digital cameras of that era writing to mini-CDs. I dont recall ones writing to 3.5" floppies.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Mavica)

> Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997), the first digital camera of the Mavica series.

> The later Digital Mavicas recorded onto 3.5" 1.4 MiB 2HD floppy disks in computer-readable DOS FAT12 format, a feature that made them very popular in the North American market.

[...]

> and a new CD Mavica series — which used 8 cm CD-R/CD-RW media — was released in 2000.

I still remember the "writing to floppy" animation on the thing. It was a seriously cool bit of kit to use, chuck it in your bag with a box of floppies and you were good to go.

I'm pretty sure that at that time I had tons of music (using winamp) and photos on my computer (scanning was the way at that time).

You must've been somewhere nice that had fast internet. I think most people back then had dialup, and downloading a single song would take at least 20 minutes on their 28.8k modem.

You just waited that long to download music. That was all there was to it. MP3 was mindblowing when it was first released, in terms of how good it sounded for the size.

Obviously many people just ripped their own CDs. Many CD-ROMs didn't support ripping CDs at a data level - so you had to rip in real-time via analog! Crazy.

Most people I knew had 56k modems by 98 (by '99 I had a cable modem), 128kbs compression was the standard you'd find, and getting a song for free by just waiting 15 minutes was still magic

Edit almost forgot about Ethernet in the dorms. I picked my college because of high speed Internet.

As mech4bg said, much or most of people's .mp3 libraries at that point had probably come straight off CD. Napster wasn't even released until 1999, and "Rip. Mix. Burn." was Apple's edgy new slogan of 2001 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo .

Wow, that's quite a find. A rare artifact from the pre-iPod, pre-iTunes Store tip of Apple's foray into digital media, and a strong piece from Apple's agency at the time.

You just queue up a bunch of stuff using a download manager[1] and stay connected for longer. Come back the next day (or two or three) and voila! The good managers would even resume partial downloads if the connection dropped (which it always did).

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getright

Why download? I simply ripped all my CDs to mp3s.

That was a pretty good collection.

In the good old days, MP3s were generated by ripping CDs or copying from other people's computers during LAN parties.

Audiogalaxy was our savior. Search from any computer and queue up the download to your satellite. When you arrived home 5-6 hours later your music would be waiting for you.

Nobody used 28ks in 1998 unless their phone lines didn't support 56k.

Yes, even if you exclude MP3s of commercially-recorded music as not really personal, it would be very hard to defend the proposition 'iMovie gave birth to the idea of "personal digital media"' or even 'iMovie first made "personal digital media" a reality'. Apple (and MS) had been trying to make consumer video editing a reality since at least 1991 and the launch of QuickTime (an awkward date if you want to centre everything around Jobs and/or NeXT). iMovie and the FireWire iMacs probably were an important step forward in making digital video editing into a mainstream and well-oiled consumer activity though.

Quicktime circa 1991 was not really "personal digital media"-grade technology. It was pixelated, postage-stamp sized videos even on a 640 x 480 screen. It wasn't until 1998 and the Sorenson codec that Quicktime began to approach what we would recognize today as usable video.

People on Hacker News might've, but the general public had a far slower uptake on it.

you're one of the 'very few' then. As was I.

WinAmp came out before this too. Pretty sure it had lots of users. I think in general this side of the story is a bit overblown .. at the time (1998/99) iMac and Mac in general was a small player globally.

That's why patents on this sort of thing are so dangerous. The steady march of the state of the art makes the impossible possible. When it first becomes possible, it seems novel, because no one has ever done it before. But it was the hard disk and the image sensor in the camera that was the invention, not "personal digital media".

A few of my schools had Apple QuickTake[1] cameras around 1995-6. Not quite 'personal' or 'affordable', and it was a line that Jobs cancelled when he returned to the company, but the pins were being set up.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake

No. Digital cameras became affordable nearer 2001-2002.

Absolutely! I remember the date because I was living in London and I wondered how to get a digital camera, which was still quite expensive and of course also crappy. It was also the time of GeoCities.

Once I had my first digital camera I immediately amassed thousands of photos, and I didn't have a Mac.

I don't think digital cameras were particularly affordable at this time. My digital camera was $600, purchased in 1997 or 1998.

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