It was Sunday morning January 25th, 1998, and I was in The Associated Press’s trailer in the parking lot at Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego. Last-minute preparations were underway for coverage of Super Bowl XXXII between the Green Bay Packers and the Denver Broncos – Favre vs Elway. Perfect!

This was a big day for me and my fledgling company, Camera Bits (which was just me doing business as). AP was willing to give Photo Mechanic its first real exercise to cover this big game even though PM wasn’t for sale quite yet. It was at version 0.99 I recall.

So I was a bit surprised when Jim Dietz, my technology contact at AP, asked me to make just one last minute change to PM. I laughed at him because this is definitely not standard protocol. Normally everything is all set up and locked down by Saturday, and Sunday is to just get the job done. Making a new build of PM on game day sounded crazy to me, but Jim explained why it wasn’t such a big deal, and that he had faith in me.

Back then it was important for AP to include the words “DIGITAL PHOTO” in some IPTC field (I can’t remember which one) if the photo was taken by a digital camera versus film. I frankly think it was a “be prepared” warning to AP’s members (newspapers) because the images from the 1.3MP NC2000e camera were a bit low resolution, especially when the editors did a tight crop. But since AP’s Super Bowl coverage was all digital by then, Jim asked me to just “rubber stamp” every photo that PM processed with this IPTC field indicating a digital source.

It was an easy enough fix (what we nerds call a “one-liner”), so I agreed and made a new build in the trailer on my laptop. Jim proceeded to test this build, but I had to give it a new version number and I was at 0.99. So I jokingly called it the “Elway Release” because I was rooting for Denver.

Project Manager Howard Gros was not too happy to have to install the Elway Release on all of the computers in the trailer, and especially the laptops that were ready to leave for the stadium seats and end-zone to accompany the fixed-position photographers.

Howard wasn’t upset that I called it the Elway Release (even though he was rooting for Green Bay), it was the last-minute changes. But you have to get it right, and this would eliminate the chance of any NC2000e photo slipping into the system claiming to be “film” quality. These were definitely “digital quality,” which had a bad reputation back then. Good enough for the newspaper rag apparently.

Fortunately, everything went well as far as I could tell. Photographers on the field would have their 105 MB (my guess) PCMCIA hard disks rushed very carefully to the parking lot trailer by (“film”) runners in envelopes with a pre-printed name of the photographer and their quick note of what happened (e.g. “forced fumble on 20”).

These photos would get ingested on one of the four AP “Piranha” servers (Windows NT boxes with 3 PCMCIA card readers each), the disks erased and sent back to the photographers like clockwork. And sometimes the runners would have to swap out a freshly charged camera as well because the NC2000 (and all Kodak DCS 4xx cameras) had a fixed battery.

Considering the cost of these cameras ($17,950, but discounted to $16,950 for AP members), I thought it was strange to see several just sitting on a shelf in the trailer – until I realized they were all being charged.

The Piranha servers would “ingest” the photos into folders onto the new AP Server (“Audrey”) with the last name of the photographer (e.g. “Martin”), and a unique number based on a “twin check” sticker. The twin check stickers came from a roll that had pairs of sequential 4-digit numbers that are used when developing film to maintain provenance.

I thought it was funny that AP was still using film “technology” for digital, but it was all very well organized and efficient. The notes on the envelopes would help to find high-priority moments, and the combo photographer / twin check number would give the editors the folder name (e.g. Martin-1234).

The photos from the fixed-position photographers (e.g. seated in the endzone) took a very different trip to the trailer. Their trip was relatively immediate because it was wireless and no runners were needed (other than a camera swap of course). This was a first for AP to have wireless transmission from the field.

Each photographer in the seats had a “laptop operator” sitting next t