"Ok, youse guys, listen up!" -Taylor, 1963.
The original 1963 site was written and put on the web in 1999. That's five years ago. [In this year of 2012, it's 13 years already]. Five years is a long time in computerland and in internetland. It's like fifty years in any other technology. Though not for those dwelling in cubicles, very many of this site's visitors would have been using dial up connections and even at that counting themselves lucky to see a consistent, honest, 28.8k.b.p.s. on downloading.
Five years later, most site visitors will have "high speed" connections. What the cable and telco operators actually deign to give us is a question but the days of 14.4 modems on voice lines are over. We can now have on this site rather larger files than those on the original site pages.[ So it is in 2012.]
Your cheap old webmaster has just acquired a fine instrument (July of 2004) which has made all this improvement possible. A scanner in a sorry condition but of high quality and very cheap was purchased, taken apart and cleaned up. It has the finest mechanism yet seen for digitizing negatives and will do that at an honest 2,400 by 2,400 pixels. The resulting files are some 27 megabytes in size for each 35mm frame. When the operator overrides the automatic gradation software and the image's levels are later hand balanced individually, the end result compared to the earlier scans is astonishing. See if you agree.
The implications of great scans, much better bandwidth, our own server and as much capacity as your server wrangler cares to put on line mean that we own the world. In this section about the fabulously successful 1988 reunion, all these advantages have been added together. The image files are of better quality and they are larger. They have not been made stupendous, merely decently larger. The images could be sharper at the cost of larger files and longer downloads for you site visitors. That may be done after receiving comment from you visitors. Have your say. For the moment, the present standard will serve us well.
Please, PLEASE: those few of you for whom these files are too large or too numerous, write to your author and request a c.d. or d.v.d. r.o.m. of the site. Don't suffer by trying to down load what are for your connection stupendous amounts of data. Such a c.d. or d.v.d. r.o.m. can be "played" on your computer just like any other disc. The web browser that you are using right now will cruise that disc with the greatest of ease. It will be better than web browsing. If you have a recently manufactured d.v.d. player, though such a player will not show the text on the site, it will "play" the image files on your television receiver and show them full screen.
For those who must pay connection charges or volume fees, please do the same: write to the web master. He will be pleased to burn a disc for you, too, and send it via the snail.
One of the fans of this site said, during the 2003 reunion, that she appreciated the site as a sort of a "park" on the web. She could go there and stroll from time to time and trade the hurly burly world for a quite interlude.
So, with all that in mind, in a moment set out on a stroll down another path on this site, the 1988 path.
