Beforre there was Photoshop

Way cool. I really like track ball the guy is using. Only a few years prior I was feeding batch cards into the main frame at Cal Poly for my programing course and had to come back the next day to see the results.

I would have been blown away, at the time, to see that.

I remember, circa 1988, turning my ITT XTRA XT-class computer in the evening and setting it to reindex a text database of bibliographic information for around 750 books, maybe fewer, and it would be done in the morning sometime. I wonder how long it really took to sharpen a photo on those reel-to-reel tape drive machines. Did they have any kind of solid state RAM, or would it have to search through tape to read the image, execute the commands, and output write the new image to some other spot on the tape or on another tape drive?