So when I was there I was much younger much more dimwitted (I know, even more than I am now) and on top of that I still drank. WHEW….. Anyway we used to go 4-wheeling all the time, I can not remember the names of any of the places and I suspect even if I were there again I would not be able to find them again. There were a group of us in the barracks that had four wheel drives and almost without fail, on the weekends we were tearing something up. It was great fun and no one got hurt so we had that going for us. Joe and I hung out a lot there, I remember we installed cruise control on his car and in the instructions it clearly stated to turn the potentiometer to mid point to start with. Well there was no way that was happening, we turned it all the way up and on our first test we found learned they actually knew what they were talking about. When Joe hit the cruise button the gas pedal hit the floor, I do not remember the model car it was but it was red and when he hit that button it took off like a scolded dog. Hahaha, makes me laugh just remembering it.
So after reconnecting with him on Facebook I decided to pull out some OLD photo albums to see if I could find any pictures of Joe, and I did. It was one where we were in my Jeep and it was dark, I seem to remember we were stuffing our sleeves with beers before going into see the Rocky Horror Picture show. I posted it up on his page, his response was funny – “Wow, that is a blast from the past”. It certainly was, it is amazing how different we become with age, not only inside but outside as well. He also commented, “That's weird that you would even have a camera. Nobody carried around cameras back then” to which I got to thinking, he’s right. How many people had cameras when they were teenagers, not now but in the early 80’s? I always had cameras and being that I am a gadget head from way back I bought the Kodak Disc 4000 camera when I got out of boot camp. I had a 35mm Pentax but that was not something you just drug around with you, you might be confused with a tourist. So the first trip out of boot camp in Orlando I bought that camera and I bought and Kozo Ohsone’s little invention – they called it the Sony walkman.
Both those items were ahead of their time, in my opinion anyway. The walkman played audio cassettes, for those of you who remember what those are, it was crude by today standards but was a technological marvel of the late 70’s. I even got an optional am/fm tuner – it was the exact size and shape of a cassette and you popped it in like a cassette. Man, looking back that seems so hokie. I remember being blown away by the small (not by today’s standards) headphones and the incredible sound that a cassette player offered in such a small package. It was cool and therefore I was cool because I had one of them. Was I the only one who thought like that back then or was that common? Anyway, I was all of 18 and I was all set, I had the very cool Sony Walkman and the very cool Kodak Disc 4000.
So the Disc 4000 was one of many models that Kodak sold, and there were many other makers of the Disc series of cameras. The Disc series was designed to be a still photography film format aimed at the consumer market, it was introduced by Kodak in 1982. That camera was not all that different that the Nikon 14.3 megapixel camera I have today, in size only. The film came in a flat disc and was fully enclosed in a plastic cartridge. Each disc held fifteen 11 × 8 mm exposures, arranged around the outside of the disc, with the disc being rotated 24° between each image. 11x8mm is TINY and even 4x6 photos were a bit grainy, 5x7’s were bad and an 8x10 – FORGET it, it looked like butt. It was really a very consumer-oriented point and shot camera, aside from the 110 (which was 13 × 17 mm so it looked a little better). The 126 cameras were still a little better than both of them, the term "126" was intended to show that images were 26mm square, using Kodak's common 1xx film numbering system. However the image size is actually 28 x 28 mm, but usually reduced to approximately 26.5 x 26.5 mm by masking during printing or mounting
So this technological marvel actually produced the worse looking pictures of any of them, but it was small and shaped like a modern day digital point and shot and that made it cool, which made me cool just by having one. I can not remember how many “discs” of film I shot on that camera before it gave up on me. While the base model disc 2000 used a replaceable 9 volt battery but the more advanced Disc 4000 had an integral lithium battery and an automatic low light detection. Both the battery and the low light detection in a 60 dollar camera were unheard of in those days. You could not even open the thing to change the lithium battery, it had to be sent back to an authorized repair facility, like I would do that. The completely flat nature of the disc format (about an eighth of an inch thick) led to the (potential) advantage of greater sharpness over spool-based formats such as 110 and 126 cameras, it was more like a floppy disc or even a large memory stick than anything else. Although the camera was discontinued in 1988 the film was available from Kodak until December 31, 1999.
It still makes me look back and laugh at this camera, by today’s standards a 6 dollar point and shot disposable from Walgreens takes pictures that are magnitudes of order better in quality. I cannot imagine a negative that is only 8x11 mm hahaha. So compared to today’s best of breed point and shot digitals, the old Disc 4000 seems crazy. That was not the last camera I purchased though, I have since had many other camera’s. My all-time favorite is my Nikon F3 HP with auto winder and 14 lenses, what a great film camera, the best film camera in my opinion. I have taken thousands of pictures with it and it is still my very favorite. I did move into the digital camera world in the late 90’s with the Polaroid PDC 700, the Disc 4000 of digital cameras. It was an 800kilopixel marvel. Yeah, not even one megapixel. My Bride got it for me for a couple hundred bucks and it was cool, which made me cool. It had 4meg of internal storage so you could take about 50 pictures in normal mode, 1024x768, it completely wiped out the four AA batteries taking those 50 pictures. That is the size I shrink pictures down to now to get them through the email, hahaha. It had a fixed-focus lens with a focal length of 5mm and it connected to the serial port on my Windows 95 machine. It used a TWAIN driver and it was a PAIN IN THE ASS to setup and it was SLOW to the pictures off.
So today I have three digitals, a Nikon S220, and Nikon S570 and a Nikon S6000 and I love them all. They are a 10, 12 and 14 megapixel marvels for sure and each was around 200 bucks when I bought them. They take stunning pictures that come flying off the camera onto my computer at blazing speeds. It makes me wonder if I will be looking back on these cameras I have now in 10 years going, WOW 14 megapixel – what a piece of crap compared to my new 200 dollar 500gigapixel model. Funny how todays cutting edge gadgets quickly become tomorrows trash.
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