Innovations that took the world by storm while leading us backwards

Have you ever looked closely at photographs from the 1950’s? Then look closely at photographs from the 1960’s. Colour! Right! Great, eh? Except for one thing: resolution. Try this—try scanning in your pictures on a computer. Set the resolution to 600X600. Chances are, your black and white pictures from the 1950’s look great, especially if they were taken with a typical Kodak Brownie. Chances are your pictures from the 1960’s look like shit, especially if they were taken with a Kodak "Instamatic" or one of those awful, disgusting, contemptible, "pocket" cameras.

Do your photos all have that nice, flat, "satin" finish? Right. That’s what you want, right? Because it looks so nice. Right. Well, scan those in, and you’ll see why I always order my pictures printed on "glossy" paper. Do you want to know when and why they invented "satin" finish? That’s right—in the 1960’s and 70’s. That’s right—when they invented those crappy little camera’s with the lousy little negatives and plastic (not glass) lenses. The satin finish makes those pictures look better than they really are because, with a satin finish, you can’t notice the lack of detail.

Now look closely at a Polaroid photo, if you have one. Well, you probably don’t have very many. Why not? First of all, they weren’t much of an improvement over the Instamatic. The resolution is a little better, but the colour reproduction is not as good. But, as everyone knows, Polaroid pictures were very expensive, compared to other colour pictures. And anyway, I never could figure out why anyone would want a picture instantly, while you could still see the thing you were taking a picture of. I suspect that the biggest use of Polaroid cameras was for pictures you might be embarrassed to send to the local photo shop for processing.

Then we really did have progress. In the 1980’s, everyone went 35mm. Good photographers had used 35mm for years, but in the 1980’s, the general public suddenly developed an appetite for better pictures and these complicated but excellent cameras became quite popular. One of the reasons they became quite popular was because they suddenly became automatic or semi-automatic. You still generally had to focus the camera yourself, but shutter speed and aperture could be set automatically. Good. That’s progress. Look at the pictures from the 1980’s. Aren’t they great? Well, they would be, except that we still use that ugly satin finish. Why? The pictures were now good enough to look good, once again, on glossy paper. So why do most processors still use the satin finish?

Probably because many people still use the stupid little "Instamatics" and pocket cameras, and a lot of people buy disposable cameras, and the processing companies will be damned if they have to buy two kinds of paper.

So now it’s 1999. And what do we have? The electronic camera! Hurray! Progress again! But wait a minute. Look at those prints! They’re awful! What happened? Well, how about that. For a mere $1200 you can now buy a camera with a resolution of 640 by 480: the same quality as a Kodak "Instamatic". Yeehaw! And you even get to give up your telephoto, wide-angle, and zoom lenses for a good old-fashioned fixed-mount single-lens camera! [Note: a decent 35mm photograph has a resolution of 1200x1200.]

I can’t believe that people are going out and spending over $1,000 for electronic cameras with a single fixed lens such poor resolution. Why? I figure these cameras should sell for about $125. Even better, someone should market an adapter that lets you shoot electronic photos on your existing 35mm equipment, so you can keep using your valuable lenses, flashes, filters, and other accessories.

The one part of electronic cameras that makes great sense is the cost of processing. Zilch. Zero. Nothing. You just download it onto your computer.

Do you realize that anything that cost nothing will eventually be worth nothing? Electronic photos will never be valued as highly by people as printed photographs are. But that does mean that your old printed photographs will be valued very highly, in the future. So don’t throw them out. They will be loved, as artifacts of an age of strange progress.

Other products that took the world by storm but were inferior to the products they replaced

1. VHS (replaced the vastly superior Betamax).
2. Microsoft Windows (annihilated OS/2, Geos, the Macintosh, Amiga, and numerous other superior operating systems).
3. the CD: a lot of people won’t believe this but a well-made turntable attached to a good amplifier produces better sound than the best CD player does. This is because sound has to be filtered and reduced in order to fit on a CD. Imagine if the same amount of innovation and design that was invested in the CD had been invested in turntables. So why did CD’s win? Because transportation is one of the largest costs of distribution. You can transport about five times as many CD’s as LP’s in the same space. But, as the music industry quickly discovered, you can charge the public more for the CD! The CD case is also one of the worst designs ever foisted on an unsuspecting but gullible public—it’s flimsy and awkward and stupid.)
4. the computer mouse (the truth – and every good keyboardist knows this— is that the keyboard is way, way faster for doing anything on a computer than a mouse is. The difference is, a mouse makes it possible for any moron to use a computer. The mouse has a legitimate use for graphics, but that’s about it. That’s commercial progress, but not a technological improvement).
5. the ball point pen (replaced the elegant fountain pen, and the utilitarian pencil, with this sloppy, blobby, leaky contraption). And how come you never see ads for pens anymore? Kind of strange, isn’t it? Remember all those Bic ball-point pen ads, showing how indestructible they were? We still see ads for disposable razors and diapers and toilet tissue—why not for pens?
6. rear-wheel drive (don’t forget that front-wheel drive was invented not in the 1980’s but in the 1950’s. It lost out to American-made rear-wheel drive behemoths for almost 30 years, until the Japanese proved it’s superiority, a thirty-year detour of unimaginable mass idiocy).
7. television (vs. high resolution tv. do you realize that you’re looking at a color picture that was designed in the 1950’s and first mass-produced in the 1960’s? Yes, your television picture is obsolete, but nobody wants to invest in the hardware required to improve it. The U.S. government has finally shoved the industry, kicking and screaming, into the next century, with requirements of HDTV broadcasts within the next five years. By that time, of course, the technology will be outdated again.)
8. Sound in Movies: If you ever in your life summon the self-discipline and determination to do something unusual and exotic, go to the video store and pick up three or four of the better silent films and sit down one night and watch them. Until you do, you probably have no idea of what was lost when films gained sound. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were unparalleled geniuses whose work almost disappeared entirely when sound was introduced and the movie-going public flocked to see and hear the novelty. Try Chaplin’s "City Lights" or Buster Keaton’s "The General" and remember, there were not computer-generated special-effects in those days and Chaplin and Keaton did their own stunts. And what did we gain in sound? Movies shot entirely in rooms in studios. It took years for the camera to regain it’s mobility and for Hollywood to master sound editing and effects. For all that, name a single movie produced in the last twenty years that is as good as "City Lights", if you can.
9. Winmodems- the "mopeds" of the computer world. Real modems do a good deal of the work of converting packets of internet data into digital 1’s and 0’s so your computer can understand them. Winmodems shove all of this work onto your computer’s main CPU. Think about that. If Windows 98 is so fast on your computer that you would just love to slow it down a little so you can save $50 on a modem—please go for it. And while you’re at it, you might want to look at this beautiful typewriter with a LCD display I’m trying to sell…. So why are Winmodems so popular? Did you ask for one? Did you tell the computer dealer—"hey, I think it would be a great idea if my next modem slowed my computer down a little"? No, you didn’t. But the profit margin on Winmodems—which actually consist of nothing except a pipeline from the phone line to your CPU—is much higher than on real modems.

Copyright © 1999 Bill Van Dyk  All rights reserved.

Click here for illustration of backwards progress.