Over the years I have talked about many small appliances but rarely do I write about technology items that I can't live without. I was reminded of this from a recent photo I posted on Facebook. It was taken from a 45 year old slide. In the 1970's nothing was digital. If you took photos, you would load film into the camera and take the pictures. You never knew if they were good or bad until you had the film developed. You could get printed pictures or have them made into slides. Those slides had to be viewed on a special projector. We thought it was great to see our pictures on the big screen. It was a version of the old movie camera. Those movies were put on reels and were also shown on a screen with a special projector. Never did any of us think we could some day take photos or movies from our phones. Now if a shot doesn't turn out, we just delete it and try again.
We had a lot of slides from the early 1970's. I had them in a box and out of sight. One day as I was cleaning and organizing, I came across them. I held them up to the light and could tell they were from a long time ago. This is when I decided to google saving slides to the computer. Surprisingly there were a lot of options, but I decided to order this. It is a slide viewer. If you like the picture and you want to save it, it can be saved on an SD card or you can transfer it to your computer. It was a lot of fun viewing these old pictures.
I had just recently gone through all of our old slides, when we received a package in the mail. It was from my husband's brother. He had taken all their old family movies from the 1940's and had them put on CD's. We had only viewed these movies on a jumpy old projector, but now they are preserved on disks. They will be preserved until CD's are obsolete and then the next generation will have to figure out how to view them with more modern media. I know we still have several BetaMax tapes that can't be viewed. We even bought a machine that converts tapes from Beta to VHS but you needed a Beta machine and a VHS machine. I managed to figure out converting VHS tapes but not the Beta machine. The Beta player was so old, it chewed up the first beta tape we tried to copy. Technology changes faster than we do so we still can't view them. Maybe there is a magic device that can save these BetaMax tapes but I don't know about it, so I will pack them up for someone else to throw away in the future. For now, I have some old movies and special slides saved. The color isn't always so good, but the originals were not of the quality we enjoy today. They were fun to discover.
My grandma and grandpa.
Me and my oldest daughter from 1973.
Oldest daughter shoveling snow.
