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Software Vault: The Gold Collection
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Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO
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WHAT.HLP
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1992-03-26
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Over the years, a growing community has become
increasingly familiar with "vintage" American
instruments, primarily the electric guitar. Toward
this end, a plethora of published media has
appeared on paper form extolling the virtues, and
particulars of, said instruments. After spending
the past twenty years of my life anxiously
awaiting the latest pontification of "America's
leading authority" (usually a book), and buying
it, I now have a bulky, kludgy reference set that
usually takes considerable time to look up any
answer. Every decade or so I buy a new copy to
replace one "loaned out" or simply worn out. The
older books are growing very long in the tooth.
But my dilemna did not stop there. In
conjunction with my brother, over 1000 instruments
have passed through our hands, and usually with no
more tangible proof than a tattered Polaroid.
Details such as color, condition, tone, unique
qualities, and what it looked like are by and
large forgotten. With larger dealers and
collectors, I suspect this issue is more severe.
I am probably naive in the belief that anyone
still cares about the instruments, and not just
the money. The instruments seen twenty years ago
in abundance cannot be seen anywhere at the same
time today. As the instruments are fanned out all
about the globe, we have each of us lost something
My intent is to preserve now so I, nor any willing
participant, will lose anything further.
Books are a historical necessity, and text is
immortal. Most guitar texts do cover a mountain of
data, and this research must provide a basis on
which to move forward upon. However, the pictures
usually lacking because they are black & white, or
very small. Further, printing large, color
pictures is expensive for both the publisher and
the consumer.
AXE is basically a picture application with no
real upper limits. The application currently has
about 800 full screen VGA, 256 color pictures in
varying resolutions. Picture qualities will only
increase in resolution and shrink in storage size.
The guts of this idea is in Still Video computer
images. This format has many advantages over
traditional photography, mainly that images can
be manipulated (larger, smaller, etc.), have an
indefinite life, and can be transmitted
electronically over telephone lines. The formats
used currently are: GIF (Graphics Interchange
Format) for pictures and PCX for Patent scans.
Patent scans are the only scanned images, as 3
dimensional objects or their pictures do not
translate at all through a scanner. These PCX
images, at 150 DPI (dots per inch) yield a 1624
X 1248 (rows by columns) picture from a 8.5" x 11"
piece of paper. Since black and white are only 2
colors, the viewer (more later) can draw these
images relatively quickly, usually less than 30
seconds on my 386 machine. The patents average
about 75K each. Compression routines are
unreliable on images this large.
The GIF images are generated from a Still Video
camera, digitized in a high resolution format,
usually 640 x 480 (rows and columns) and 256
colors. These files are between 150 and 250K each.
At this rate a 1000 picture application could take
over 200 Megabites of hard disk space. My solution
is to compress these files into 320 X 200, 256
color which keeps about 85% of the resolution in a
30K file. I have allowed that any portion of the
pictures can be used or deleted at any time to
allow for ever changing hard disk storage
priorities of the user. The installation program
will install or reinstall any portion of AXE at
any time.
The images are currently approximately 200,000
pixels, or data points. Still video equiptment is
available to double this resolution and capture
the data twice for extra resolution,
interpolation, and all around black magic.
However, this is necessary to ensure the data
captured today will be valid for generations to
come, even if the instruments are never to be
accessed again.
At 199,000 pixels, a 640 X 480, 256 color
picture is roughly 200K. To adequately cover the
"vintage American guitar", my estimation is that
about 5000 pictures will be required. This will
equate to about 1000 megabites, and compression
may reduce this to 800 meg. Distribution will by
necessity be on CD ROM, which can handle about 660
megabites each. Don't groan - CD ROM readers are
about $400 and will be cheaper than any other
component of your computer system. The good news
is that CD's cost about $10 each to produce in
quintity, so $20 for CD's is far superior to $400
for the equivalent floppies. But, you will still
need many hundreds of megabites of hard disk space
to store / use the entire product of the future.
If we choose to generate a 640 x 480, 16.7
million color (24 bit format) file, the size would
be more like 907K with no compression. This would
be required for highly critical manipulations,
analysis, and color publishing. Yes, electronic
images can be used in publishing, so paste up is
history. But how can we get 24 bit images with
16.7 million (real) colors ?
A technology exists, while still evolving at the
speed of light, that writes the 24 bit images as
strings of fractal geometry. Yes, they write
pictures into sets of geometric functions. This
yields orders of magnatude more data into an
average 12K file. If true, the entire product of
the future can be published on 50 floppys and
only require the user to have 50 megabytes of hard
disk space to store 5000 pictures of guitars. But
that ain't all: the image can then be written to
any size or resolution level desired, or
manipulated as desired. The fractals will also
"fill" in at any level as long as there is data.
For example, zoom in on that worn finish spot, and
if the data is available, the program will show
the layers of finish. Can you say electron
microscope from a camera, manipulated from any
computer, from a 12K data file ? If it really
works ...