Here is one of the first electronic images I recorded and processed, and the date was around 1994. The camera was an Olympus VC-100, then called "analog video," and it was the first commercial attempt at taking single frames and storing them on small floppy disks.

The camera was comfortably compact, but the images were less than TV quality, which was the way they were intended to be displayed. In fact, the results were so disappointing, my VC-100 failed to get much use until I bought a Macintosh LC III computer. Somehow, I managed to connect the VC-100 to the Mac, and there was a program available that could dither an image into black or white pixels. Next, I discovered a simple fax application that accepted my image files, although I am sure the programmer never envisioned anyone doing that. So, I had the ability to take pictures with an electronic camera and send them to someone's fax machine.

One very snowy day, I took a picture of the huge drifts outside, then faxed the pictures to a friend in Pennsylvania. It seemed absolutely incredible that this process actually worked. As spring approached, I began to think of ways to make artwork out of a technique that lacked grayscale, and this picture of sailboats was one of my better results. The only remaining example is a paper print, which I scanned in order to post it here. Even if I had the floppy disk, there would be no way of playing it now. Within a few more years, the Internet became available, and one could then send images by UU encoding. The next step for me was a program that captured stills from video tapes, and that is how my earliest images for the Web were produced.