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Free Software Downloads: Bryce, Daz Studio, and Hexagon

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Bryce, Hexagon, DAZ Studio Free Download
Bryce, Hexagon, DAZ Studio Free Download

Saturday I learned that DAZ (Digital Art Zone) is making available the following software as free downloads until February 29:

  • Bryce 7 Pro 3D Landscape Software (retail price $249.95)
  • Hexagon 2.5 3D Modeling Software (retail price $149.95)
  • DAZ Studio 4 Pro 3D Software (Winner of 3D World’s 2011 Software Innovation of the Year Award) (retail price $429.95)
  • 3D Photoshop Bridge (retail price $199.00)

In addition there are a number of free models and textures available as well. The total retail price of the basket of software, models, and textures that I downloaded was $1,350. The one requirement is that you subscribe to their newsletter - meaning you give them your email address.

Note that your order will show up in the Available Downloads link from your Account Dashboard and that you are allowed 4 downloads of each product you have ordered. The serial numbers for your software are retrieved separately via the Available Serial Numbers link. All downloads are in the form of executable files. The largest downloads are:

  • Bryce 7 Content - 670 meg
  • Daz Studio 4 32-bit - 441 meg
  • Daz Studio 4 64-bit - 439 meg
  • Bryce 7 Pro - 254 meg

I’ve never used Hexagon or DAZ Studio Pro but Bryce was the first 3D software I ever used - back when it was version 3. I haven’t used it in years but I still have a large collection of Bryce files and it would be nice to perhaps resurrect some of them. The name is taken from Bryce Canyon, which I had the pleasure of visiting a few years ago (there’s a photo of me at Bryce on the bottom of my home page). The first version of Bryce was released as a Mac only product in 1994. Version 3.1 of Bryce 3D was released in 1997 by MetaCreations Corporation - this was when I first purchased Bryce. Bryce was acquired by the Corel Corporation in 2000 who released version 5 of Bryce in 2001. Bryce was sold to DAZ in 2004 who has gone on to release versions 5.5 and 6.0 with Bryce 7 being released in 2010. Bryce 3D has always been looked down upon as a package for newbies with limited capabilities. While these criticisms are true, it’s important to remember that for many digital artists, Bryce was what opened the door for them to explore the world of 3D graphics software. It’s low price and easy-to-learn interface made it a perfect software solution for those digital artists looking to get their feet wet.

Hexagon is a tool for creating 3D models. According to the DAZ web site:

Hexagon delivers all the tools a graphic artist needs to create detailed 3D models ready for final render. Packed with features such as; DAZ Studio Bridge, sculpted primitives, freehand modeling brushes, micro-displacement modeling tools, comprehensive UV-mapping modules, advanced 3D paint, and instant ambient occlusion. Hexagon provides you with all the options of expensive competitor software, but at an affordable price.

I’m not sure what to make of 3D Photoshop Bridge. The DAZ web site describes it as a " DAZ Studio plug-in designed to connect the power of Photoshop with the unlimited content possibilities of DAZ Studio. It’s the next step to maximizing your creativity. It will also save you money by eliminating the need for costly photo shoots and stock imagery, save you time with quicker rendering, and save your brain by swiftly and easily integrating the best features of DAZ Studio and Photoshop…Easily pose characters and objects three-dimensionally with the 3D Photoshop Bridge while in DAZ Studio,"

Of course it would help if I knew more about Daz Studio. In this case, download first then investigate was my motto. According to DAZ:

DAZ Studio is a feature rich 3D figure customization, posing, and animation tool that enables anyone to create stunning digital illustrations and animations. DAZ Studio is the perfect tool to design unique digital art and animations using virtual people, animals, props, vehicles, accessories, environments and more. Simply select your subject and/or setting, arrange accessories, setup lighting, and begin creating beautiful artwork.

The free 3D software is available via download only from DAZ3D.com between now and February 29, 2012:

http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d/free-3d-software-overview

Product Links:

Note that there are a number of video tutorials available for Bryce, Hexagon, and DAZ Studio on YouTube.

Here’s to happy and creative computing. Jim

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Digital Art and Unintended Consequences

Monday, December 12th, 2011

Example of unintended consequences in digital art
An example of unintended consequences in digital art

Yesterday I was working on an image processing program to use as a part of my art creation workflow. I was writing a program to texturize an image so that I could incorporate the output as a layer in a Photoshop document.

As a part of the development process, I decided to use as the source image the painting Paris Street, Rainy Day by French artist Gustave Caillebotte. This is the same image that I used to serve as the "discovered" painting for my article and applet Particle Painting: Name That Painting.

To create the look I was after I needed to use the third dimension, aka the z axis. The addition of the z axis made it possible for me to use that axis as the source of distortion while keeping the correct color information in the x,y plane. Using 3D also allowed me to rotate the image relative to the "camera" thus introducing another level of distortion.

All was going well until I made one small change to the variable I was using to control the distortion along the z axis. This single change took what had been output that was recognizable as the source image and produced an image that was completely unrecognizable. I’ve used a cropped version of that output to illustrate this post. Below is a side by side comparison of the source image that my program used as input and the resulting output.

Caillebotte's Paris Street, Rainy Day before and after
Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day before and after.

This can not be called an algorithmic oops or a glitch. Rather it is a case of parametric discovery. It is this discovery opportunity, whether by design or by accident, that makes digital art such an interesting and revolutionary arena for artistic creation.

It remains to be seen whether or not I will ever make use of this program in a production environment. Even if I don’t, what I learned during the process will serve me well in the future. So remember the golden rule of digital art: never be afraid to experiment.

Ad Astra, Jim

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Tutorial on Recursion Published in CMD Journal

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

CMD Journal cover
CMD (Computational Media Design) Journal cover

This spring it occurred to me to write an article about recursion for my Artsnova web site. I must confess that I really haven’t put any of my recursively created algorithmic art on my web site or made it available for sell but as a programming artist, I find the concept of recursion fascinating. The principal interest for me is in the creation of the program that creates the art. In other words, what excites and interests me most is the act of creating the recursive algorithm. The article/tutorial was to be one in a three part serious about the three "R’s" of algorithmic art: Random Numbers, Recursion, and Repetition. The tutorials were to be written using the Processing platform rather than C++ as Processing seems to have broader appeal to programming artists and is simpler to learn for people new to the field.

Shortly after completing the recursion tutorial I learned of a new magazine being published: CMD (Computational Media Design) Journal. From the CMD Journal website comes the following description of the publication:

THIS IS WHY WE’RE HERE
We are interested in the exploration of the intersections of art, design and computer science to encourage new ways of seeing, thinking and creating in order to empower and inspire inventive, innovative and creative research, artistic and design practices.

THIS IS WHO WE ARE
CMD Journal is an educational magazine about computational media design. The magazine was started by Marjan Eggermont and Laurel Johannesson in 2010 both to learn more about and to become a forum for this relatively new field.

Rather than publishing the article/tutorial on my web site, I decided to submit it to CMD Journal. I’m pleased to say that my submission was accepted and appears in issue 2 of the magazine, which is now available online.

Click here to access the current issue of CMD Journal

I did have to do some trimming of the tutorial in order to have it fit within the submission word limit. Now on my long list of to-do items is an entry to create an expanded version of the tutorial to use for my three "R’s" of algorithmic art set of tutorials.

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A New Website Design for Artsnova

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

New Artsnova web site design screenshot
The new Artsnova web site design

Thursday night I rolled out a new version of my Artsnova web site. My primary goal in redesigning my web site was to make the site’s navigation system more user friendly. If you want to know what the original version of the Artsnova web site looked like, look no further for I had designed the templates of this Wordpress blog to provide a seamless integration between my website and blog. The only difference between the blog and web site was the content of the sidebar. On the web site, the sidebar consisted of a secondary navigation system and some internal advertisements which varied from page to page.

Whereas in the original design the site navigation was split between a horizontal nav bar below the masthead for section navigation and a vertical navigation menu in the sidebar for intra-section navigation, I combined both into a single CSS driven drop-down menu in the new design. This makes it much easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for and to move around the web site quickly.

Another benefit of the new single menu system is maintenance. The dual menu system meant that there were structural differences from one page to the next. The new single menu system combined with a standardized sidebar means that the header, navigation, and sidebar divs are identical for all my web pages. Since I am not using either a CMS (Content Management System) or SSI (Server Side Includes) to manage my web pages but am instead coding them all up the old fashioned way - by hand - this standardization can save me quite a bit of time when adding new pages or undertaking site-wide changes.

My secondary objective was to clean up and standardize my sidebar elements and add social media linkage. I recently put the addthis.com social media bookmarking tool on a few of my pages for testing. In this redesign I have added the addthis widget to all my pages. I’ve also added the Facebook feed for my Facebook page to the sidebar. The only wrinkle is the Facebook widget which tends to be somewhat erratic in getting data back from Facebook on the initial load.

My final objective was to tweak the aesthetics of the page layout. The changes I made to the divs which control the design were minor but, to my eye, improve the overall appearance of the site.

I actually had two competing designs and the design I’ve gone with is the second. The principal difference between the two designs is that the design-not-chosen uses a vertical drop-down navigation menu in the sidebar to the left of the masthead for site navigation. I really liked the way this Javascript/CSS menu looked and worked. It really created a nice compact design as you can see in the screen shot below.

Artsnova alternate web design
The alternate Artsnova web site design

In the end I decided against this design for two reasons. First I don’t like to employ Javascript for something as crucial as site navigation. If someone has Javascript turned off, while the menu still displays and functions, it does not collapse and consequently becomes a very long string of sidebar buttons. Second, the Javascript did take a small amount of time to actually build the menu and while this was going on, the raw html menu elements were exposed to the visitor - the same as if Javascript were turned off.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the way the design turned out. I hope that visitors to the site find that it is now easier to navigate from one section to the next. At some point I will need to redo my Wordpress templates in order to provide seamless navigation between the web site and blog but that will have to wait for another day.

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Tweet A Processing Sketch

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Processing Sketch
A Processing sketch to illustrate this post

If you check out my Twitter account (http://twitter.com/digitalart), you will note that in the past I created a limerick that fit within the 140 character limit Twitter imposes.

A while back there was a Processing Tiny Sketch Competition in which the Processing community was challenged to create a complete Processing sketch with a 200 character limit for the Processing program. That contest was hosted by Rhizome (you can visit my Rhizome account).

This got me to thinking: what about creating a Processing sketch that could be tweeted. If you haven’t heard of Processing, it is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. Processing is built on Java and the Java programming language is available to Processing users. It’s a wonderful programming environment for artists and programmers alike. You can see what many folks have done with Processing at the OpenProcessing web site.

So my challenge to myself was to write an entire Processing program using less than 140 characters and I wanted the resulting image to be dynamic rather than a static. Fortunately Processing is quite flexible and there are a number of ways to shrink a program. Before explaining my methodology, here is the full unshortened version of the Processing program source code:

// declare integer variables
int x;    // x for horizontal pixel coordinate
int y;    // y for vertical pixel coordinate
int r=100;// r holds default screen size

// Setup() function is executed once at program start
void setup() {
  size(100,100); // Set the screen size
  background(0); // Set background color to black
}

// The draw() function executes continuously
void draw() {
  // Cycle through every value of x
  for(x=0;x<r;x++) {
   // For each x, cycle through every value of y
   for(y=0;y<r;y++) {
     // Set the pixel at x,y to the specified color
     set(x,y,color(frameCount*r*sin(frameCount*x),
             20*r*cos(frameCount*y),
             r*frameCount*cos(x)));
   }
 }
}

And here is the Twitter optimized version:


int x,y,r=100,t=1;void draw(){for(x=0;x<r;x++)for(y=0;y<r;y++)set(x,y,color(t*r*sin(t*x),20*r*cos(t*y),
r*t*cos(x)));t++;}

The program is just 121 characters long. I’ve named this program Scottish Tartan as the output resembles a tartan. There’s a nice tie in as I am part-Scottish via the Campbell clan. Other than omitting the comments and crlfs (carriage return line feeds), there are functionally only two differences in the two programs.

  1. I deleted the setup() function because it is optional. It is used to initialize various parameters and options and is executed just once. By removing it:
    * the canvas will default to a size that is 100 pixels wide (the x dimension) by 100 pixels tall (the y dimension).
    * the background color will default to gray.
    * the colorMode will default to RGB with 256 possible values for each color.
  2. I replaced the system variable frameCount with my own variable t. The frameCount variable is incremented each time the draw() function is executed. Substituting my own variable t saves characters.

Other strategies to shorten the program were to:

  • Keep variable names to one character (x,y,r,t)
  • Use the increment operator t++; instead of t=t+1;
  • Eliminate unnecessary for statement brackets

See the Processing program as a Twitter tweet

If you want to see what the program actually does you will need to download and install Processing. Installation is straight forward and best of all it’s free. Why not give it a try. Visit http://processing.org/ for more information and to download Processing.

Processing Books

There are a number of books that have been written about how to use Processing to create images, animations, etc. Following are books that I recommend - based on the fact that I’ve bought and used them.

In addition to the books listed above, there is a new book out on Processing that was released in August 2010. I do not have this book so can not comment on it. You may want to investigate for yourself. The book is Processing for Visual Artists: How to Create Expressive Images and Interactive Art

Merry Christmas everyone, Jim

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Don’t Be Alarmed Now

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Old Artsnova Blog
The Old Artsnova Blog

Yes this is the Artsnova Blog. The new look is a result of finally taking the time to modify my old Wordpress theme template so that my blog is fully integrated into my web site. While my blog and web site were on the same domain, they had been created separately at different times. While I created my own design for my web site, at the time I set up this blog I just went with the default Wordpress theme modified with a variety of my own tweaks over time.

The result was that my blog and web site:

  • had entirely different looks to them
  • had different page layouts
  • had different navigation systems

The bottom line was that for a visitor it was like going to two completely different web sites. This meant that visual branding suffered and that cross traffic (going from blog to web site and from web site to blog) suffered.

The new blog design now matches the Artsnova web site in that it uses the same basic page layout, design, color scheme, and uses the same navigation system. I have deliberately kept a couple of minor cosmetic differences. The purpose of these visual differences is to help visitors distinguish between those pages that are a part of the web site and those pages that are a part of the blog. The visual cues are use of a different background color for the content area (white here on the blog); a slightly different background color for the navigation sidebar (a lighter shade of blue on the blog); and the addition of the text Digital Art and Space Blog Reflections on Art, Computer Graphics, Photography, Space and Astronomy to the masthead for the blog.

I hope that you enjoy the new look and feel of the Artsnova Blog. If you encounter any problems with this new design, please let me know.

Thanks and have a Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

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New Wacom Tablet: Intuos4

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Wacom Intuos4
Wacom Intuos4 Medium

Wacom has just released its new line of pen tablets - the Intuos4.  From the product write ups it looks like it might be time for me to upgrade. I currently use an Intuos2 tablet with my desktop for all my “real” graphics work. My Intuos2 was an upgrade from an older, smaller Graphire tablet which I still use on occasion with my laptop at home and when traveling.

I must say that once I started using a pen and tablet combination for my graphics work, any time I went back to use my mouse it seemed like a giant leap backward. For the Intuos4 it looks like the biggest advances have been made in the areas of pen sensitivity and responsiveness - the very features that attracted me to the Wacom tablet in the first place. If you have never used a pen and tablet in your graphics work, take this test. First, with a pencil and paper write in cursive your signature. Then, with the paint program of your choice, write your signature using your mouse. You will see that your mouse-created signature is no where near as smooth or as natural looking as your pencil and paper signature. Writing using a tablet and pen is very much like writing using traditional media. While not as versatile as a traditional paint brush, the Wacom pen is as close as you can come digitally.

I am not going to go into a detailed list of the Intuos4 features - there is a good summary of the features at the Amazon Wacom Intuos4 Medium Pen Tablet product page.

Once you’ve bought your Intuos4, you will be able to download several pieces of software that come bundled with the product. The software consists of the following two plugins for Photoshop:

  • Nik® Color Efex Pro™ WE6
  • Wacom Brushes 3.0 for Photoshop

and your choice of two of the three following software packages:

  • Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 Windows or Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Macintosh
  • Autodesk SketchBook Express® 2010
  • Corel Painter Sketch Pad

Given that I already have the full blown versions of Photoshop and Painter, I would download SketchBook. While I wasn’t able to find any information about Autodesk SketchBook Express 2010, I did find the following about SketchBook Express 2009.

Back to the Intuos4, it is available in four sizes (dimensions given are for the active area):

The size of my Intuos2 puts it somewhere between the size of the Medium and Large Intuos4. Based on that I will probably upgrade to the Wacom Intuos4 Large Pen Tablet as it is somewhat larger than my Intuos2 and is just over $300 cheaper than the Wacom Intuos4 Extra Large Pen Tablet. Also, the footprint of the Large is a manageable 18.7 x 12.6 inches whereas the Extra Large consumes a hefty 24.5 x 18.2 inches of desktop space.

Only one question remains: when I upgrade to an Intuos4, what will happen to my old but trusty Graphire since my Intuos2 will be reassigned to laptop service.

Ad Astra, Jim

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Space, Art, and Web Programming

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
Algorithmic Waterfall
Algorithmic Waterfall

Space, art, and web programming - that’s what I’ve been spending all my spare time on lately for which postings to this blog have suffered.

On the subject of space exploration, I just finished reading Camp Century City Under the Ice by Walter Wager. Published in 1962, the book provides a general overview of Camp Century - a nuclear powered “city” then all of two years old. Existing below the surface of Greenland’s glacier, this base allowed for year round occupation and observation of the ice cap and polar winter.

I learned about Camp Century from a friend and decided to create a presentation using Camp Century as an analogy for a moon base. The number and nature of the challenges faced by the team from the Army Corps of Engineers that envisioned, built, and maintained Century were strikingly similar to the types of problems facing lunar base planners. The book’s author also foresaw this when he wrote:

Since Camp Century has already demonstrated that young Americans can survive in miserably isolated outposts under bitterly adverse conditions, the US scientists planning the Free World’s first lunar output will approach their immensely more complex assignment with a certain amount of confidence.

With respect to art, I’m still working my way through the Processing book I wrote about previously in Processing: Finding Beauty in Math. In fact I created the image Algorithmic Waterfall using Processing and techniques I learned from the book.

I have also been reading Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer by James Faure Walker and published in 2006. It’s an interesting read with the author making points that I both agree and disagree with. Once I’ve finished it, I’ll post a more extensive review here.

As if space and art weren’t enough, I’ve also been busy working on the National Space Society’s web site. One of the hats I wear in life is that of chairing the National Space Society’s Web Oversight Committee and the Website Redesign Committee. We (we being our team of volunteers) recently completed the deployment of a new CSS drop down menu and, more time consuming and troublesome, the conversion of a thousand plus web pages from an ancient, no DOCTYPE, malformed version of HTML to XHTML compliant pages. The next phase is to create a new graphic design for the site and get it deployed. I’d really like to have the design portion done by the end of August and the actual deployment completed by the end of September, if not sooner.

Ad Astra, Jim

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Context Free Art

Saturday, May 17th, 2008
Context Free Art
Context Free Art Example

My favorite aspect of digital art is the seemingly endless possibilities for mental and artistic exploration it provides. For example, I have only just begun to learn how to use Context Free. Context Free is a graphics program that creates an image based on a set of written instructions. These instructions are termed a grammar and consist of rules and parameters. These rules are saved in a Context Free Design Grammar (CFDG) file.

For me, this is reminiscent of the way computer graphics were created back in the early days. Unfortunately I do not recall the name of the programming package I first used to create graphics on an Apple II+ back circa 1982. Having no input device other than the keyboard meant that the only way to create graphics was programmatically.

The colorful geometric figure above was created using Context Free. The program I wrote to create this illustration is shown below.

// A sample Context Free CFDG
startshape Art
rule Art {
draw{ hue 120 sat .5 }
}

rule draw {
SQUARE{ b -1}
SQUARE{ s .995 b 1 }
draw{r 30 s .995 hue +1 }
}

In brief, the above program works as follows. To begin, the startshape directive tells Context Free the name of the rule to start drawing with. In this case the name of the rule is Art.

The rule Art consists of one statement: an instruction to execute the rule named draw. You will note that the draw statement has two parameters. The hue parameter specifies the color to draw and the value of 120 corresponds to green. The sat parameter specifies the saturation of the color, in this case 50%.

At this point control is passed to the draw rule. The first statement, SQUARE, tells Context Free to draw a square. The parameter b is used to specify brightness and the value of -1 corresponds to black. So a solid black square is drawn. The second statement, SQUARE, tells the program to draw another square. In this case there are two parameters. The s parameter is used to specify the size percentage. In this case .995 tells Context Free to draw this square at 99.5 percent the size of the last square drawn. The parameter b, used to specify brightness, is given the value of 1 which corresponds to white. So a solid green square is drawn. If this were the last statement, then the result would be a simple solid green square (from the second SQUARE statement) with a black border (from the first SQUARE statement).

The magic happens in the final statement. The draw rule is directed to execute the draw rule. When a statement or function calls itself, this is referred to as recursion. The beauty is that in this new call to the draw rule we can modify the initial drawing conditions. The r parameter tells Context Free that the first thing it should do is to rotate the drawing angle by the number of degrees specified, in this case 30. The s parameter instructs Context Free to reduce the size of whatever is to be drawn to 99.5 percent of what was drawn last. Finally, the hue parameter says to increment the value of the hue by 1.

The draw rule is then executed using these new initial conditions. And when the statement to call the draw rule again is encountered, the initial conditions are again altered by the parameters. And again and again and again. The draw rule will be called over and over until the size of what is being drawn shrinks down to nothing. When this last draw is executed, it returns control to the draw that called it and so on all the way back up the chain until control is finally returned to the Art rule.

Writing programs for Context Free can give you a nice mental workout. The program shown above is a very simple one that just scratches the surface of what is possible. You really should give this software a try. And I’ve saved the best for last: the Context Free software is free. You can download a copy for yourself from the Context Free web site.

Go ahead - give it a try. Jim

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Doomed Diskettes

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
Diskettes
The Doomed Diskettes

I recently undertook the Herculean task of going through all my diskettes, moving their contents onto my hard drive if worth keeping and then disposing of them. I had been pretty good about backing up data files and program installations to the extent that over the years I had accumulated in excess of 1800 diskettes. I haven’t actually used diskettes for several years now, all of which were created on old PCs. Going back through these diskettes was like going through a dust laden trunk from the attic. The worst part of going through all my diskettes was that the data transfer rate was agonizingly slow. You get used to the speed of CDs and USB memory sticks and then you pop in a diskette and drum your fingers as you wait.

This was not my first experience with migrating to a new media. Recall that 3.5 inch diskettes were preceded by 5.25 inch diskettes. Try today to find a disk drive able to read those! But that transition was very simple given that those diskettes (at least the ones I had) only held 720 kilobytes of data and I didn’t have very many of them. That was a piece of cake migration. This was different: 1800 diskettes able to hold 1.44 megabytes of data each. Not only did I have an order of magnitude difference in the number of diskettes but each diskette held twice as much information as their predecessors.

Amongst my old disks I did find quite a few surprises. The best gem was a diskette containing the source code and executable for the classic computer game Colossal Cave. I can remember playing this text-based adventure game in college - accessing the host system it was on over my 110 baud modem. If memory serves me correctly, this game was the original computer Adventure game.

Some of the other software I came across included:

  • CorelDraw version 2 (1991)
  • Windows 3.0 (1990)
  • PhotoFinish 1.0 by WordStar (1991)

The oldest software I found was IBM DisplayWrite 4 dated 1986. DisplayWrite was IBM’s first word processing software for the PC and an abomination it was. Rather than use it at work, I went out and bought a copy of Samna’s Ami Pro which was later purchased by Lotus and became Word Pro. I also found a diskette of software and references to BBS’ (Bulletin Board System). BBS’ were computer systems that you would dial into with your modem - the only way to fly in those pre-Internet days. Most of the BBS’ I wanted to connect to were a long distance phone call away and this was back in the days when long distance calls weren’t cheap.

The oldest data files dated back to 1989 and consisted of tables of data on near Earth asteroids. I also found backup copies of all the issues of Spacewatch and PSF News from the time when I was the editor of those publications.

At the finish of the project, the stacks of diskettes to toss numbered in excess of 1,700. I kept about 70 diskettes containing software, system utilities, etc. and another 20 blank diskettes. I next went through the files I had copied to my hard drive more closely, deleting those I considered either unimportant or redundant. At the conclusion of my project, I had just over 180 megabytes worth of files. It’s remarkable to think that of the files contained on over 1,700 diskettes, I was able to write all those I kept to a single CD with room to spare.

It’s even more remarkable to consider the great strides that have been made in data storage. In the early 1980’s diskettes could hold only 100 kilobytes of data. Today I have a portable USB hard drive that fits in my pocket and holds 250 gigabytes of data. Measured in terms of my 3.5 inch 1.44 megabyte diskettes, that’s the equivalent of 177,777 diskettes! (See Math Note 1 below) Here is another analogy: if each of my 1.44 megabyte diskettes had been filled to capacity, then my entire collection could have been written to four CDs or just one DVD.

Just as work grows to fill the available time, so to do files grow to fill the available space. When I started working with graphics files some 20 years ago, the files were small enough so that a number of them could fit on a single diskette. Today the size of my graphics files has grown to the extent that some consume the bulk of a single CD. And liberal use of a digital camera means that I now have tens of gigabytes of RAW files to back up. Now we have music and videos as well. At present I have in excess of 20 gigabytes worth of MP3 files and I expect that number to continue to grow. And there is every reason to believe that this trend will continue.

What does this all mean? The continued evolution of data storage technology means that the medium we save our files on today will not be accessible in the future. Combine this with our ability to save files of ever larger size in ever larger quantities. The bottom line is the next migration from CDs and DVDs to their successor could be a real nightmare - a task too hard even for Hercules.

Happy Computing, Jim

Math Note 1: Okay so I have a portable USB hard drive that holds 250 gigabytes which works out to be equal to the storage capacity of 177,777 3.5 inch diskettes. The picture at the top of this post is of a pile of something over 1,700 diskettes. That pile measures about 30 inches long by 14 inches wide and 13 inches tall. So a 5,460 cubic inch volume of space can hold 1,700 diskettes. Assuming the same degree of packing, it would take 570,980 cubic inches of space to hold 177,777 diskettes. That’s 330 cubic feet or a space that is approximately 7 feet long by 7 feet wide by 7 feet tall!. Imagine all that squeezed into a space that fits in my pocket.

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