Friday, October 17th, 2014

	My workstation for graphics
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I need to digitize some paper or image, I use Mac Quadra 700.
In times, when even cellphones have multicore multigigahertz CPUs,
I believe my Quadra does an excellent job and I see no reason, why
should I replace it.

Nine years ago, I obtained a Relisys Avec Colour 2400 scanner. It
has a SCSI interface and can scan in up to 2400DPI. In 1993 it was
worth $1,099, in 2005 I've got it for free, because it was too big,
too slow and simply too old to be used in the commercial sphere.
Even though I do not scan too often, I took it before it was sent
to be eco-recycled. 

The only problem was, that it came only with drivers for Windows NT
and I didn't have any PC-compatible machine back then. What I did
have, was a PowerComputing PowerWave 120 with MacOS 8.1 and after
couple of days of searching all over the web, I found a PhotoShop
plugin for the scanner and a utility called NIH Image, which accepts
PhotoShop plugins. Everything worked on the first try, I even 
installed a VNC server on the PowerWave, so I could scan from
my iBook G4 and save images via network directly to the iBook HDD.

In 2009 I bought Quadra 700. It's more compact than PowerWave, it 
can run A/UX and even though it's way slower, I like it more.
I installed System 7.1, NIH Image and even PhotoShop 2.5.1, found
on some HotLine server. My workstation set was complete.

Yes, cellphones ten years ago had faster CPU than the 25 MHz 68040
in Quadra and twenty megs of RAM is not much either, but when 
scanning A5 book in 300DPI/grayscale, I can do two pages in three
minutes. That includes scanning itself, rotating the picture,
selecting page regions, copying them to new images and saving as 
GIF files. I wait twenty seconds for the scanner to finish scanning,
a minute for the computer to rotate and compress images and ninety
seconds computer waits for me to do the manual human work. So even
with thousand times faster computer and instant scanner, the whole 
process  would be just two times faster. That doesn't seem to be
worth scrapping two perfectly working devices.

.