I started in photography in 1972 with a Pentax Spotmatic II and a Super Takumar 50mm f1.4. I took thousands of photos with this rig along with a Pentax 35mm wide angle and a Lentar Zoom lens. I went digital 15 years ago buying a Canon XT 8 megapixel body and some kind of zoom lens that I do not remember. Currently I have a Canon 90d with a 24-105L. I also have a couple other lenses to fill in the focal lengths before and after that lens.

Digital photography is great - instant viewing of the image to show composition, sharpness, exposure and DOF. But the thing I love most about digital photography is the ability to reset ISO on the go. In the old film days a roll of film had a given ISO (ASA in those days) and you could not change it until the roll of film was complete. And of course the film types of different ISO’s were limited - 25, 64, 100, 125 speeds were common. TriX which was B&W was 400. These limited ISO’s are the reason most cameras came with a prime lens with a large aperture, f1.4 -2.0 were very common. You could push some films to 1000 if you needed to but then you experienced lots of noise. Today you can set the ISO as high as 3000-4000 without a significant amount of noise. I’ve heard of some people using ISO 10,000 and lowering noise in post. What did we do in the old days when we had 3 exposures left on the roll and the sun was fading? We did not get the shot.

I understand 35mm film photography is making a comeback. I don’t understand that. I will never go back. How about you?

As someone that worked in the field you should know better. We’re not talking about obscure or outdated proprietary operating systems, these are industry standard file types that have been around for over 30 years. We’re talking about devices that are readily available and inexpensive. Even then how many people are still storing photos on floppy disks? I think the chances of getting good images from digital media 100 years from now much better than finding shoeboxes of non-archival prints. Like I said earlier, many people with old prints and negatives are scanning and digitizing them for archival storage.

And much of our early (read 40's-60's) data were created before agreed-to standards came into being. ASCII wasn't in place until 1962, and only applied to "telegraph" standards. It was also a long process to get the various principals on board, since it was felt (and still is), that "leaking" of corporate standards could be a competitive advantage to others. I used the IBM 701, 702, and 714 machines in my early data processing days, along with the sorters, collating, output, and reporting machines.

It took years for companies to standardize on the Hollerith (ca. 1886) card.

And the issue still isn't standardization, it's the hardware.