Erstwhile Urban Wanderer

March 23, 2009 – A brief history of digital imaging from one man’s perspective.

By Dave Eriqat

The other day, in response to my father’s enthusiasm, I looked up the Canon PowerShot G10 digital camera, and after my salivating over its 14.7 million pixels subsided I reflected on how much digital imaging has evolved in my lifetime.

The Old Days

About twenty-five years ago – good grief, a quarter of a century just doesn’t sound as long as it used to! – electronic imaging largely consisted of video images recorded onto magnetic tape. VCRs and video cameras were pretty well established by then and quite affordable. However, digital imaging hardly existed, except perhaps in research laboratories or government facilities. (Laser disc video technology existed then, but it was a read-only technology and quite expensive.) In the mid-1980s I worked for a small electronic engineering firm which had a lot of experience designing plug-in boards for Apple II computers, and later for IBM-compatible PCs. One day my boss became intrigued by the notion of digital imaging – he was always a “seat of the pants” kind of guy – and we immediately embarked on a development project bring low cost image compression to the PC platform. Mind you, we were only interested in developing image compression technology, not in finding ways to actually utilize image compression technology. That was to come later. In the meantime, we all harbored a sort of blind faith that we would find some use for this technology, especially since our boss was the one taking the financial risk!

At the time, an image capture board that could be plugged into a PC cost about $4,000. It accepted a video signal from a video camera (another couple of thousand dollars), captured a single video frame and stored it on the computer’s hard disk drive. This image was not compressed, but stored as raw RGB pixel data. As memory serves, these uncompressed images offered only about 32,000 pixel colors (5-bits each for red, green and blue) and required about half a megabyte of disk space. We scoff at such minuscule storage requirements today, but back then the typical computer had a 20 megabyte hard disk drive! At that time, my computer at work – I was the software guru, after all – had two whopping 30 megabyte hard disk drives, which if used solely for storing these captured digital images would have permitted me to store a grand total of about 120 images. Contrast that with the Canon camera mentioned above, whose web site page claims that as many as 1,200 images of the highest quality can be be stored right inside the camera, each with on the order of fifty times the number of pixels of those back in the 1980s! Needless to say, hard disk drives today can store not mere hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of such images.

The massive storage requirements of such images back then was only one limitation we sought to ameliorate. The Internet, while it existed back then to serve the government and its university researchers, was not accessible to much of the public, nor did “high speed” computer communications exist. “High speed” back then meant 14,400 baud analog modems over conventional telephone lines, a speed that would require upwards of five minutes to transmit just one of those uncompressed digital images! Our lofty goal of compressing those digital images aimed at increasing the storage capacity of our hard disk drives and the speed of image transmission by an order of magnitude.

But there were some hurdles to overcome first, among them the fact that most PCs had 16-bit microprocessors (only 8-bit data buses, though) running at 4.77 MHz and 640 KB of RAM. Compare that to today’s computers which typically boast 32-bit data buses, microprocessors 500 times as fast and memories 5,000 times as capacious. Because of the paltry computing resources at our disposal we chose to develop a co-processor board containing a digital signal processing (DSP) chip that would plug into the PC and perform the “heavy lifting,” the fast Fourier transforms that formed the heart of the image compression and decompression process. Software running in the PC would slice up the uncompressed image into tiles, send the tiles to the co-processor board to be FFTed, and then receive them back for further processing. To achieve maximum compression and decompression speed, it was crucial to run the two microprocessors – the native CPU and the DSP – in parallel, so we developed a fairly complex and elaborately choreographed software design that maximized the parallelization of the operations, without even the benefit of a modern multithreaded operating system. Our software was all done in the C-language running on DOS on the PC side, and in assembly language on the DSP side.

We succeeded in our goal, however, and achieved good quality compressed images one tenth the uncompressed size. Then we set about finding markets for our “low cost” $1,000+ co-processor board and its accompanying software tools. Bear in mind that $1,000 was about half the cost of the entire computer back then, and those were 1980s dollars. In today’s dollars, everything would be two to three times as much. Surprisingly, we found quite a bit of demand for our product, at least for the first few years. Once 32-bit microprocessors started to become commonplace in desktop computers beginning in the early 1990s, it was clear that our little niche was doomed, as the desktop computer’s microprocessor was capable of performing the entire image compression process itself, Fourier transforms and all, without need for an expensive co-processor board.

Ubiquitous Imaging Today

Today digital imaging is ubiquitous and powerful microprocessors with enough computing power to perform image compression are found in everything. Digital imaging can be found on computer screens; whizzing across wired and wireless communication channels; on televisions; in digital cameras that have all but replaced film cameras; in Dick Tracy-style personal communicators, otherwise known as mobile phones; atop traffic light poles at intersections; on the dashboards of cars equipped with rear cameras to assist in backing up; and in a hundred other places, not all of them benign. Almost all digital imaging today utilizes image compression technology similar to what we pioneered on lowly PCs back in the 1980s. As with so many other technologies, today we take for granted zapping a multi-megabyte image from our mobile phone to someone, oblivious to the groundbreaking effort that went into it.

Good News and Bad News

Like all technological developments, the digital imaging revolution has been used for good and bad. It’s amazing, for instance, to be able to send a digital image of someone’s x-ray to a doctor far away for immediate analysis. It may be unappreciated by domestic health care workers, however, if that doctor happens to be in another country! It’s wonderful to be able to snap a photo of the kids and send it to their grandparents thousands of miles away, at virtually no cost. It’s not so nice to have a robot decide you’re speeding and snap a photo of your license plate and automatically send you a bill, until the receipt of which you continue to live in blissful ignorance of your transgression. It’s nice for us people to be able to see satellite photos of any interesting place on earth. It’s not so nice to realize that governments can do the same. It’s nice to be able to whip out our mobile phone, film the police misbehaving and promptly post the resultant video on the Internet. It’s not so nice for governments to criminalize such citizen activism while they themselves digitally film citizens engaged in peaceful protest.

Conclusion

It’s just remarkable how rapidly digital imaging technology has evolved. In some ways it has perhaps cheapened the “art” of photography by transforming photographs into abundant commodities. On the other hand, thanks to digital imaging we can do things today that were undreamed of even a couple of decades ago.

Oddly enough, I’m something of a Luddite when it comes to digital imaging. I don’t have a mobile phone with a camera in it, nor do I want one, and my digital camera is seven years old and captures a mere six million pixels. The irony of my salivating over a 14.7 million pixel camera is that I seldom make use of images containing more than half a million pixels. Nevertheless, if I come into some money, I might just splurge and buy one of those cameras.

March 16, 2009 – They say California is “special.” Maybe it’s true.

By Dave Eriqat

Well, I’ve been back in southern California for a week now, and it’s nice. The surprising thing is that I don’t really miss my nice house or all my fine antiques, all of which will be auctioned off soon. I’m quite content living in a small bedroom with few possessions at my disposal. I do miss the serenity of rural Kentucky, and especially my neighbor’s little dog, Boo Boo. I wonder if she realizes I’m gone. I got the impression from her heightened curiosity during my move preparations – perhaps it was just wishful thinking – that she sensed something was up.

What is also surprising is the surreal nature of life here. It’s as if people have utterly no clue about the gravity of the financial collapse or the impending, yet to be felt crisis of peak oil. I talked to a teller in a bank today – Washington Mutual, as a matter of fact, which was recently subsumed into JP Morgan – who was out house shopping with his wife over the past weekend. He said that now was a good time to buy a house, especially since sales were rising. All I could think was that house prices are likely headed down in the future, and even cautioned him that house prices may go down, but he seemed unfazed by my warning.

For much of today I felt as if I was swimming about in a parallel universe in which nothing had substantively changed. Expensive cars whizzed by me right and left, chichi art galleries with open doors abounded, construction activity generated an intolerable cacophony, restaurants hummed with hurried customers willing to a pay high price for a lunch. Even the tiny Washington Mutual branch I had expected to be closed as a casualty of that company’s recent problems was still open for business. I think at every one of the half-dozen places I went today I parked next to a $100,000 Mercedes. People definitely don’t seem to be hurting.

The obliviousness of people here, where life seems not to have changed at all, is enough to make me question the whole “collapse” theology. Examining the facts logically and dispassionately I don’t see how “collapse” – financial and civilizational – can be avoided, yet can so many other people be wrong? Or so clueless? Or in such denial? My sister said that five of her neighbors had lost their jobs, and just the other night she and her husband attended a “last supper” at the home of one of their friends who was forced into a short sale. Interestingly, it was only a couple of years ago that the same sister called me “Mr. Negative” for forecasting the present events. Despite the palpable evidence of financial collapse at the very least, life goes on, seemingly on autopilot.

It’s truly surreal. I honestly hope I and others are wrong about the whole “collapse” thing, but I have a strong feeling we are not. And I also have a feeling that a lot of other people are going to be caught by surprise and stunned by the swiftness and severity of what I expect to come.

If the ship goes down, at least I’m enjoying being with my family again – my cousins, my sister, and even my parents, believe it or not! Frankly, I’m more worried by the government’s potential desperate responses to the crises than the crises themselves.

March 9, 2009 – Anarchy is so frightening to people. Yet what if anarchy already exists?

By Dave Eriqat

One might gather from my writings that I’m not terribly fond of government, that less is more, that none is best of all. I am a pragmatist, however, and recognize that anarchy cannot work in large societies. The reason is that large societies harbor a small percentage of people who will sooner or later join forces, congealing into a critical mass that dominates the rest of society, primarily for the purpose of exploiting it. Large societies are the perfect venue for opportunistic people, enabling them to claw their way up the ladder of “success” in near anonymity until they are ready to take control of society. Exploiting a large number of people, even if each is exploited only a little at first, is the road to riches for those doing the exploiting, which is plenty of incentive for them to seek to climb to the top. This technique of incremental exploitation is the model for both government taxation and corporate monopolies.

So how can anarchy be anything more than a theoretical dream? Anarchy can work in small societies, tribes, if you will. In small groups of a few hundred people or less, common moral values, peer pressure, shared commitment and a familiarity with all others in the group is sufficient to induce people to behave. Such groups can function smoothly and enduringly with a small set of rules. It’s also far easier for people to adhere to a small number of clearly defined rules than a million obscure laws, most of which are contrived for the purpose of generating revenue for governments and corporations. It is simply impossible for anyone to comply with every one of a vast body of laws, especially since the larger the body of laws, the more likely it is that laws will conflict with one another, creating Kafkaesque contradictions that are impossible to resolve.

If we organized ourselves into smallish communities, the very kind that offer the best promise of a sustainable future for mankind, we may have a chance to exist without government. Of course, there is still the possibility – perhaps even the likelihood – of inter-tribal warfare, especially over coveted resources if there emerges a shortage of such resources. However, would such warfare be any worse than the state-sponsored, capricious, immensely destructive total warfare we practice today? I seriously doubt it. What’s more, with war waged on a personal level instead of from behind desktops and joysticks thousands of miles from the front, the participants will have ample reason to avoid future wars, unlike today where a few profit handsomely from wars without risk to their own lives.

So what do I mean by “Anarchy for the few”? What does “anarchy” mean anyway? It does not mean “chaos,” as is commonly misconstrued. It simply means the absence of government. Human beings, growing up with a multi-millennial legacy of government, can no longer fathom a world without government, even though human beings existed without government for most of their history. But is today’s lack of imagination because people don’t believe a world without government is possible, or is it because those in power who benefit from government have been indoctrinating the rest of us for thousands of years to believe that government is necessary? Animals live in anarchy and do so more harmoniously than human beings do in their strictly ordered societies. There is violence in the animal world, but it’s limited to the minimum amount necessary to eat, reproduce or defend territory, all of which pertain to propagation of an animal’s genes. With few exceptions, mostly among primates, animals do not engage in indiscriminate violence like humans do. Animals seem to move on and forget about momentary episodes of violence as soon as the need for such violence has passed, unlike human beings who seem to harbor memories of injustice and a desire for violent revenge for centuries.

What, then, would anarchy for human beings look like? There would be no laws, save a few basic values. Societal pressure – remember, we’re talking about tiny societies here – would be sufficient to enforce adherence to a small set of values. There would be no territorial borders, except those that other tribes might choose to enforce, but they could just as easily choose to relax their territorial boundaries and tolerate visitors or even new residents. There would be no fundamental restrictions on anybody, save the restrictions erected by other individuals pursuant to the defense of their own natural rights.

I submit that this state of freedom from restrictions – anarchy – already exists for a few, the elites of this world. They travel the world freely, unconstrained by national boundaries, laws or governments. They have the freedom to do more or less as they please as long as they don’t imprudently cross one of their own, in which case they may find themselves the target of a corrupt and easily manipulated political machine. One merely has to consider a single day’s headlines chronicling the lawlessness among governments and corporations to see this truth.

It matters not whether these “elites” are part of a government or are “private,” especially considering the revolving door between the two contrived sectors in what is really a symbiotic system best described as fascism. The important distinction between “them” and “us” is that they live in anarchy while we live under increasingly oppressive authoritarianism, a dichotomy I find particularly interesting since I view the two systems as polar opposites.

One might erroneously conclude that the disastrous state of world affairs today is proof that anarchy cannot work. After all, the people who run the world live in anarchy and have made an utter mess of the place. However, our mistake is granting complete freedom to people who are least suited to live without boundaries! The elites of the world cannot serve as role models for, or constraints upon one another because they are all equally defective, psychologically speaking! These people, above all, are the very people who require peer pressure to keep them in line and provide them with guidance, yet they have been given total freedom, like inmates being given the keys to the asylum. One should not conclude from this mistake, endlessly repeated throughout history, that anarchy itself is untenable. We just haven’t gone about it the right way.

I believe anarchy can work in small groups, which are conveniently the best suited to create a sustainable future as well. Without the need to support a wasteful government, fewer resources are consumed, enhancing sustainability. With every person pulling their own weight, so to speak, instead of learning how to live off the toil of others, civility and mutual respect can be restored. I harbor no illusion that those in power who are benefiting from “government” will step aside and allow us to indulge in this much needed societal reorganization. They’ve grown accustomed to their parasitic position in our society and will not relinquish it easily. My only hope is that the exigencies of the collapse, presently in its incipient stages, will eventually render the old authoritarian models irrelevant once and for all.