That old lady of The Chocolate Box, was a true trooper! In those days older people were terrified of computers and wouldn't even want to know what to do with them. This lady figured out rather quickly that it could help her with maintaining inventory and bookkeeping, she was obviously a very clever lady.
Ummm. I couldn't get the interviewer of the old lady out of my mind. All I could think about about after watching this video was how I would love to shag that brunette. But the World know us bloats from the States have warped minds. Which is OK with me as long as I get to pound that get into the mattress.
Hahahaha! But take it easy! He said "just used"... He meant there were more things around that it could be! But I see that it was unblieveble for them on that time imagining about gaming, whatching movies, talk in a network and whatever, for example, through a simple computer, or even a mobile phone or smartwatch.
That's funny, a lot of people using computers today use them for gaming, streaming, porn, uploading selfies and checking the weather. Oh yes and some intellectuals use computers to perform extremely complicated computations achieved by the use of sophisticated algorithms. :)
The music @ 9:11 is great. These BBC 80's shows really sum up what is was like the early 80's. There was so much time spent predicting how cool things would be in the future; especially computers. It seemed like we had so much anticipation and hope.
This BBC TV series was hugely important, not just for UK people but for the entire world of computing, here's why: The hardware that most of the Internet and portable devices run on now is built around an ARM processor. As are many devices predicted at the end of this programme. The ARM was produced by Acorn, as a direct result of building the BBC Micro, which was developed specifically for this BBC TV series. So this programme not only predicted the future, it effectively made it.
The BBC Micro wasn't built specifically for this programme. It was a project financed by the UK government via the BBC network, and sponsored by the BBC to incourage the use of computers in schools and for education in general. The ARM processor began life as the processor for the next planned BBC Micro model circa 1984-1985. The government funding of the project ended by late 1985 and Acorn scrapped the BBC Micro successor. The first computer with the ARM processor was the Acorn Archimedes in 1987, which was quite a capable machine and showed the true potential of RISC microprocessors. Because BBC sponsored the Acorn Micro, it was heavily promoted in this television programme. The semiconductor division split up from Acorn circa 1990 and inherited the name of the microprocessor architecture, ARM, while Acorn itself folded.
Wasn't that what Clive Sinclair intended it for? Playing games? I'm pretty sure Sir Clive never intended it to be a Low cost machine for mostly business use. ;-)
Yea.. and tape to tape copying and swapping at school, taking several attempts to get the volume mm perfect for it to load and having c90 cassettes crammed with 10+ games with the counter numbers indexed on the inlays. ;)
Me in 1983 - Oh wow! a new ZX Spectrum flight simulator game has come out. Me in 2020 - Oh for goodness sake! Everything is broken with a new NPM update, now to find the source of the issue.
Those early 80s in Europe and the US were a magical grandiose time. I miss them too, I guess that's why started doing a lot of retro computing and "low level" coding videos. Just for the nostalgia, being back, in mind and memory, in those days where the world made sense and new things were happening and ready to explore and make you marvel.
I used to watch this every Sunday morning religiously, I had a ZX80 a ZX81 a Vic 20 and a BBC model B and a Sharp handheld later on I got a C64, we did not have BBC computers at my school in the early '80s we had a single Reaearch Machines Z80 which I have owned since 1991, our technology teacher Mr Mayor had the forsight that we would not be using BBC machines in our carreers once we had left school, Mr Mayor invented the upright kettle, he was the best teacher ever
Fascinating. R.I.P. Ian McNaught-Davis (the guy with glasses). He was a really good presenter and really made this series interesting. The guy at the end (21:49) seems really sinister, he reminds me of Davros from Doctor Who!
Bless old Roy Kinnear at the start, he was quite the comic actor. I remember finding a pair of his panto pants in a bag of charity clothing in a Leeds shop. (Oh no you didn't. Oh yes I did.)
Imagine sending a few people back with the knowledge we have about computers today and take a few equipment, they would be blown away, The power on the computers back then was 0.0001 percent of what they are today, They would be amazed how you could stimulate the world in 3D real time
Just imagine going back to the mid 1970s with a few reels of Pi Picos and full technical reference documentation for them. You'd have to wait about a year for them to get over the massive shock of having as much as 4MiB¹ of disk space to work in, but once they get over that it would be amazing to see what they could achieve with the efficiency- and limitation-driven methods of the time! 🧮💾😀 One of several projects I have in mind - Which will lean a lot on 80s computing techniques - Is to develop a functional word processor running on a Pico, which will be an achievement if I ever manage to do it. But the engineers of that time would probably be able to take that exact same thing and use it to functionally replace British Rails System/360 mainframe that was running a lot of the railway data network of the time! 🚄📲😀 (¹ - The 2023 equivalent might be a £10,- smartphone with 8TB of built-in storage.)
deputyVH Yes. The BBC had a special licence deal which meant they could use copyrighted music pretty liberally. Not sure if that’s still the case now though.
I got a O' level in Computer Studies. Writing in BASIC, loved it. But what surprises me about this program at the time it was just waiting for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to get their GUI sorted and then it overturned the whole era overnight. Getting a magazine and having to copy out programs line by line.....cant believe we used to do that back then.
I remember doing that, I used to spend hours, usually with a syntax error on line 250. I remember tearing a magazine to shreds in a 8 year old rage because I typed it in wrong! 😂
I think it was Xerox that came up with a GUI, mouse control etc. No one at Zerox could see the need though. Howver I think Steve Jobs took an interest in their inventions and took it from there.
For anyone wondering the best I could learn is that the old lady in the sweet shop is using a Commodore PET. Model number I am less sure about but it looks a lot like the 3032 and the 4032.
3 years after this programme aired, I joined British Airways as a computer programmer, working on their Reservations & Fares systems. Those were the days :-)
I find it really interesting that I am watching this program on a computer that is literally 100 times faster than the supercomputer they featured. But really a 50 mhz cpu was really powerful for 1982. I got my first computer in 1995 and it ran at 66 mhz. I think they did a really good job of predicting what computers would be used for. The thing they missed was social media. Social media may very well end up having the greatest influence on society, even more than instant access to information.
A 100? The Cray-2 had only had 1.9 GFLOPS (1989). A Samsung S5 (2014) produced 142 GFLOPS - 70 times more...and that's just a phone. A PS5 produces 9200 GFLOPS... about 4000x more power.
@@keithowen3599 It wasn't the Internet _per-se_ , but PRESTEL was one of several forerunner to the modern Internet and experience gained with it established some of the present Internets working principles and standards, including the adoption of HTML for laying out pages based on the fact VideoTex block graphics (i.e. Teletext style) were proving suboptimal for some applications even in the early 80s. Prestel and its services were available to anybody with a modem who subscribed to the service...But before you ask why take-up was rather low, take a look at the cost of a Prestel setup and subscription - Todays equivalent would be like paying £60,-/month for your *SIM-only* mobile phone contract! 😲 (Compare with France, where MiniTel access and terminals were made free to all.)
Aye, that it was...Just don't ask about the cost of subscribing to PRESTEL, which is why take-up was mainly confined to larger organisations and businesses! It was a great tool, but it also came with a great🇬🇧 price tag! Unsurprisingly, Prestel died out in the early 90s. 💸 In direct contrast: After doing some math, France Telecom worked out that providing free terminals and access to their equivalent - _MiniTel_ - Worked out considerably cheaper than the cost of producing and delivering telephone directories over a ten year period, so they opted for making MiniTel free-to-all. 🖥🇫🇷👍 Not only did this make France the first country to enjoy the benefits of a publicly connected nation - Despite MiniTel being described by some as technologically inferior to Prestel - But it also gave the network a much longer lifespan: MiniTel lasted for about 32 years - Being finally turned off in 2012 - And probably delivered at least 8x the expected return on investment to the French taxpayer. 🇫🇷💰🙂
Love it when he says all these computers together process at a rate: 50... MILLION.... INSTRUCTIONS... PER... SECOND!!! Haha crazy when you consider that the average mobile phone today operates at or above 1000 MILLION instructions per second.
Learnt Assembler on my first computer - a 1980 Acorn Atom, and I remember the Computer and Video Games magazine very well, the games listings often had printing errors!!
i loved this show , back when the BBC only wanted to give you information with no agenda i remember watching ti to find out about micros and decided i could only really afford a spectrum but it was the first step of a journey the nice sweets lady with her pet was brilliant she was exactly how people were fearless and curious by the way , who misses a box of carousel at Christmas ?
I love these retro documentaries. As time goes on everything tends towards the lowest common denominator. Sure this is over simplified compared to what would be taught in a uni program, but at the very least the presentation is still upright.
I used those airline reservation services back then. Everything was still done through 300 baud dial-up modems on a phone line. Went WAY faster than it does today, almost instantaneous, because there was so little data overhead. No GUI. No paging. Just text and numeric menus.
They didn't have any aware in 8:24 about 30 years later, smartwatches and mobile phones would be more powerful than a main frame computer like that. Another interest thing is in 22:27 when that journalist said about computers: "at the end of 20 years almost everybody will have one, or acces to one". He was almost right! Here in Brazil, today, we have more cell phones for example than people. They also had no idea about what was going to be a social netowork, and how it would change the way of people to communicate and to work. We all need to watch more videos like this, to imagine what is going to came next.
There were plenty of folks who refused back then... many people are fearful of change and being made obsolete, when in truth it's a case of "I can't be arsed" as it is also today. People are inherently lazy and th need a kick up the backside
this is actually false, it might look like that to you (a gamer) but the wast majority of computers are not used for gaming at all, also the wast majority of computer users do not use them to play games.
Are PC games the main driving force behind processor speeds? I did not know that. I just thought everyone wanted faster computers, no matter what you use it for.
Huh? That's not the case at all. Just like the show said, it costs a lot to build the first (R&D) then gets cheaper the more they make, it was mostly research and enterprise that was able to fund the progress of computers, those innovations then trickle down to the consumer at a more affordable price. This is still the way it works today with new technological innovations.
13:03 bless, lol i remember using a typewriter a few times, so frustrating, but thankfully computers came along and many years later, ending up after some hard work and waiting for the vacancy to open up, worked in I. T. Support and then Server Support... Happy days!!!
The weather computer at 5:00 did 50 million instructions per second. We don't measure in MIPs any more since computers are too fancy for that to make sense. Now it's operations. A GTX 4090 can do over 80 trillion operations per second.
Can’t believe it was 1982 - I was 7 years old playing games on my cousins college computer on a green screen while mom went to work and used a mainframe.
8:50 I love how the technologist actually predicts the extreme miniaturization of the minicomputer; back then it was pretty common for people to assume that computers would only get bigger and bigger, and to be rather short-sighted when it came to the accessibility and portability of future technology. (And of course today in 2020 the Apple Watch is more powerful than a roomful of those mainframes!)
That's curious....anyone know why this episode 1 of 'The Computer Programme' differs slightly from the _other_ episode 1 uploaded to TH-cam? The difference/s being that the opening Roy Kinnear skit is completely omitted whilst Chris Searle's opening "it's happening now" monologue is filmed on location here, instead of in the studio (as in the other version)....? Is one version an edited repeat of the other or perhaps the pilot to the series?
Neb6 yeah there’s no understating how powerful those supercomputers were, and you can’t apply the old ‘my watch is more powerful than’ just because it was old. It had a big mass of processors.
In 1982, the most powerful computer in the world did 50 million instructions per second. A modern cheap desktop PC does around 300,000 million instructions per second.
There were things called rental shops, Sure you remember them like: Rumbelows, Radio Rentals, Granada TV, etc My Auntie used to rent out her VHS player, Dishwasher from there as she couldn't afford one outright. She then bought them both after a year
I had one, and a couple of my mates did. I managed to swap a Spectrum +2 with a knackered tape drive for a used C64 and 1541, the shop was daft enough to switch the Speccy on and see it working, but didn't test the tape :)
I remember watching this series in the 80s when I was agonising whether to buy a Spectrum or a Dragon (Spectrum won!). It all sounded a bit stilted and BBC-establishment, but at least it was about computers ! 25 Yr Computer Professional (retired)
I wish we had this show when I was young but a sat dish was the price of a car back then. .. and I wish there was this quality of production today for my kids to watch instead of other kids playing roblox...
That old lady of The Chocolate Box, was a true trooper! In those days older people were terrified of computers and wouldn't even want to know what to do with them. This lady figured out rather quickly that it could help her with maintaining inventory and bookkeeping, she was obviously a very clever lady.
a pioneer. dual disk drive in 1982. trailblazer
She appears in this little BBC clip as well, where she talks about building her own computer.
th-cam.com/video/jbu0kmCeLSI/w-d-xo.html
@@baardbi seriously? Wow I gotta see this, now. Thanks! Awesome.
Ummm. I couldn't get the interviewer of the old lady out of my mind. All I could think about about after watching this video was how I would love to shag that brunette. But the World know us bloats from the States have warped minds. Which is OK with me as long as I get to pound that get into the mattress.
13:02 Very intelligent older lady right there. She wasn't afraid to learn about computing!
She should have made a website and done click and collect, would have made a fortune! lol
Yeaahh,, I very happy to
Sadly her chocolate box shop is now a fast food takeaway - checkout 25 Bucklersbury Hitchin
@@speedbird737 Really!!... I assume she is long gone as well.... Wonder how her Computer consulting business fared??
Phillis is a boss
"i really hate to see computers just used to playing games... its degrading" ohh boy ...
This made me lol....... if only he knew............
That poor, poor man.
Hahahaha! But take it easy! He said "just used"... He meant there were more things around that it could be! But I see that it was unblieveble for them on that time imagining about gaming, whatching movies, talk in a network and whatever, for example, through a simple computer, or even a mobile phone or smartwatch.
how the best processors maker nowadays sale their product : we have THE BEST GAMING performance
That's funny, a lot of people using computers today use them for gaming, streaming, porn, uploading selfies and checking the weather. Oh yes and some intellectuals use computers to perform extremely complicated computations achieved by the use of sophisticated algorithms. :)
The music @ 9:11 is great. These BBC 80's shows really sum up what is was like the early 80's. There was so much time spent predicting how cool things would be in the future; especially computers. It seemed like we had so much anticipation and hope.
This BBC TV series was hugely important, not just for UK people but for the entire world of computing, here's why:
The hardware that most of the Internet and portable devices run on now is built around an ARM processor. As are many devices predicted at the end of this programme. The ARM was produced by Acorn, as a direct result of building the BBC Micro, which was developed specifically for this BBC TV series. So this programme not only predicted the future, it effectively made it.
The BBC Micro wasn't built specifically for this programme. It was a project financed by the UK government via the BBC network, and sponsored by the BBC to incourage the use of computers in schools and for education in general. The ARM processor began life as the processor for the next planned BBC Micro model circa 1984-1985. The government funding of the project ended by late 1985 and Acorn scrapped the BBC Micro successor. The first computer with the ARM processor was the Acorn Archimedes in 1987, which was quite a capable machine and showed the true potential of RISC microprocessors.
Because BBC sponsored the Acorn Micro, it was heavily promoted in this television programme.
The semiconductor division split up from Acorn circa 1990 and inherited the name of the microprocessor architecture, ARM, while Acorn itself folded.
Ah, highlight of my week as a teenager :-) Good times. Assembly language was so much easier to understand than teenage girls.
I think it still is :)
unixnerd23 8 bit processors were fun
@@charles-y2z6c I knew my VIC-20 inside and out, every peek and poke location address
@@timroach5898 I know most of the ZX Spectrum pokes. And I was scared of girls.
Haha, so true
Thumbs up just for the "Yes, we have no Banana" joke.
we now have Banana Pi!
This BBC programme looked stupid then and it looks even stupider now.
Roy Kinnear as a shifty computer salesman. Brilliant.
I remember this episode... I got my first computer a 48k Sinclair Spectrum in 1983... Learnt basic on that machine. But mainly played "silly" games.
Wasn't that what Clive Sinclair intended it for? Playing games? I'm pretty sure Sir Clive never intended it to be a Low cost machine for mostly business use. ;-)
Same here
Manic Miner was the birth of platform gaming.. the birth of a genre!
I believe it was the first to have in-game sound (Mountain King)... awesome! :-)
Yea.. and tape to tape copying and swapping at school, taking several attempts to get the volume mm perfect for it to load and having c90 cassettes crammed with 10+ games with the counter numbers indexed on the inlays. ;)
@@fiskrond9212 Donkey Kong was out a few years earlier but that was a game on a small console.
Me in 1983 - Oh wow! a new ZX Spectrum flight simulator game has come out.
Me in 2020 - Oh for goodness sake! Everything is broken with a new NPM update, now to find the source of the issue.
I was born 1983
This woman was a hero..lord how I miss those days
Those early 80s in Europe and the US were a magical grandiose time.
I miss them too, I guess that's why started doing a lot of retro computing and "low level" coding videos. Just for the nostalgia, being back, in mind and memory, in those days where the world made sense and new things were happening and ready to explore and make you marvel.
Ah yes, The Computer Program, great show of which I did watch a few of them back in the day. I see COMMODORE in the background, thumbs up for that!!
Yes, a Vic 20. The 64 came out 7 months after this program was made.
"The computer will mostly sit idle. Like a car." My mom can only wish mine did.
I used to watch this every Sunday morning religiously, I had a ZX80 a ZX81 a Vic 20 and a BBC model B and a Sharp handheld later on I got a C64, we did not have BBC computers at my school in the early '80s we had a single Reaearch Machines Z80 which I have owned since 1991, our technology teacher Mr Mayor had the forsight that we would not be using BBC machines in our carreers once we had left school, Mr Mayor invented the upright kettle, he was the best teacher ever
This was my 'feel good' show. I appreciate it even more now!
Roy Kinnear, what a legend!
Fascinating. R.I.P. Ian McNaught-Davis (the guy with glasses). He was a really good presenter and really made this series interesting. The guy at the end (21:49) seems really sinister, he reminds me of Davros from Doctor Who!
A PAEDO
Rex Malik came the associate producer on later programs
@@aalexjohna I definitely wouldn't have him as a babysitter LOL
@@Scripture-Man On your bike, you God bothering piece of shit
Bless old Roy Kinnear at the start, he was quite the comic actor. I remember finding a pair of his panto pants in a bag of charity clothing in a Leeds shop. (Oh no you didn't. Oh yes I did.)
I knew that I knew him from somewhere - looked him up. Most Americans like myself know him from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Willy Wonka comes to mind, and other movies and tv filmed in Britain.
@@DisgruntledPigumon He also had a funny role in the Beatles movie Help.
He did a great turn in Blake's Seven, in an episode called "Gold". He was a legend. They don't make 'em like that anymore...
Imagine sending a few people back with the knowledge we have about computers today and take a few equipment, they would be blown away, The power on the computers back then was 0.0001 percent of what they are today, They would be amazed how you could stimulate the world in 3D real time
Just imagine going back to the mid 1970s with a few reels of Pi Picos and full technical reference documentation for them. You'd have to wait about a year for them to get over the massive shock of having as much as 4MiB¹ of disk space to work in, but once they get over that it would be amazing to see what they could achieve with the efficiency- and limitation-driven methods of the time! 🧮💾😀
One of several projects I have in mind - Which will lean a lot on 80s computing techniques - Is to develop a functional word processor running on a Pico, which will be an achievement if I ever manage to do it. But the engineers of that time would probably be able to take that exact same thing and use it to functionally replace British Rails System/360 mainframe that was running a lot of the railway data network of the time! 🚄📲😀
(¹ - The 2023 equivalent might be a £10,- smartphone with 8TB of built-in storage.)
The theme tune was Kraftwerk's Computer World but I see it has been dubbed over for copyright reasons I imagine. Classic TV!
deputyVH Yes. The BBC had a special licence deal which meant they could use copyrighted music pretty liberally. Not sure if that’s still the case now though.
I got a O' level in Computer Studies. Writing in BASIC, loved it. But what surprises me about this program at the time it was just waiting for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to get their GUI sorted and then it overturned the whole era overnight. Getting a magazine and having to copy out programs line by line.....cant believe we used to do that back then.
Oh yeah, I remember that, we also programmed in Qbasic in school. It was great fun. That got me into writing text adventures.
I remember doing that, I used to spend hours, usually with a syntax error on line 250. I remember tearing a magazine to shreds in a 8 year old rage because I typed it in wrong! 😂
I think it was Xerox that came up with a GUI, mouse control etc. No one at Zerox could see the need though. Howver I think Steve Jobs took an interest in their inventions and took it from there.
Thank you genius Jeremy Paxman and able to serve the late Sir Clive Sinclair with genius £160 computers😊👍
For anyone wondering the best I could learn is that the old lady in the sweet shop is using a Commodore PET.
Model number I am less sure about but it looks a lot like the 3032 and the 4032.
I recognise the man on the "alert" flyer hanging beside the cash box in that shop 13:57 . I think we crossed path yesterday.
I did my City in Guilds programming certificate on a BBC micro back in the 80's. This was a must watch back then.
Can't see this buying airline tickets by computer catching on...
At least they have been trying for decades.
3 years after this programme aired, I joined British Airways as a computer programmer, working on their Reservations & Fares systems. Those were the days :-)
The Retro Computer Museum in Leicester has plenty of old computers, pet, spectrum, c64, vic 20, MSX, etc
I find it really interesting that I am watching this program on a computer that is literally 100 times faster than the supercomputer they featured. But really a 50 mhz cpu was really powerful for 1982. I got my first computer in 1995 and it ran at 66 mhz. I think they did a really good job of predicting what computers would be used for. The thing they missed was social media. Social media may very well end up having the greatest influence on society, even more than instant access to information.
A 100? The Cray-2 had only had 1.9 GFLOPS (1989). A Samsung S5 (2014) produced 142 GFLOPS - 70 times more...and that's just a phone.
A PS5 produces 9200 GFLOPS... about 4000x more power.
Pretty amazing you were able to book a flight over the Internet back then
Not over the internet. But you could go to a Travel Agent who could use a dedicated terminal to buy you a ticket
@@keithowen3599 and no danger of overbooking of seats because of the database rules😉
Now about those cancellation and rebooking policies that we have today vs 1982… 🤔
@@keithowen3599 It wasn't the Internet _per-se_ , but PRESTEL was one of several forerunner to the modern Internet and experience gained with it established some of the present Internets working principles and standards, including the adoption of HTML for laying out pages based on the fact VideoTex block graphics (i.e. Teletext style) were proving suboptimal for some applications even in the early 80s.
Prestel and its services were available to anybody with a modem who subscribed to the service...But before you ask why take-up was rather low, take a look at the cost of a Prestel setup and subscription - Todays equivalent would be like paying £60,-/month for your *SIM-only* mobile phone contract! 😲
(Compare with France, where MiniTel access and terminals were made free to all.)
Aye, that it was...Just don't ask about the cost of subscribing to PRESTEL, which is why take-up was mainly confined to larger organisations and businesses! It was a great tool, but it also came with a great🇬🇧 price tag! Unsurprisingly, Prestel died out in the early 90s. 💸
In direct contrast: After doing some math, France Telecom worked out that providing free terminals and access to their equivalent - _MiniTel_ - Worked out considerably cheaper than the cost of producing and delivering telephone directories over a ten year period, so they opted for making MiniTel free-to-all. 🖥🇫🇷👍
Not only did this make France the first country to enjoy the benefits of a publicly connected nation - Despite MiniTel being described by some as technologically inferior to Prestel - But it also gave the network a much longer lifespan: MiniTel lasted for about 32 years - Being finally turned off in 2012 - And probably delivered at least 8x the expected return on investment to the French taxpayer. 🇫🇷💰🙂
Love it when he says all these computers together process at a rate: 50... MILLION.... INSTRUCTIONS... PER... SECOND!!! Haha crazy when you consider that the average mobile phone today operates at or above 1000 MILLION instructions per second.
It's one Computer. That's how big a Cray is.
Learnt Assembler on my first computer - a 1980 Acorn Atom, and I remember the Computer and Video Games magazine very well, the games listings often had printing errors!!
"hi hopefully you have a ticket for me on the 630 to paris?"
"right sir what name"
"serle"
"computer says no"
paul house 20:01 😂😂
Roy Mitchell Kinnear had too short a life. It's so cool to see him doing commercials like this. To date I had only known him as Veruca Salts father.
Are you in the U.K? He was well known over here. A familiar face on our T.V.s.
Most impressive was how those chocolate bars looked so big back then.
I was a schoolboy back then and chocolate bars were much bigger.
Top quality BBC journalism
Back when he phrase wasn't paradoxical.
ANd those silly games have been the number one reason for every CPU/GPU advancement. Without games we'd still be 16 bit.
i loved this show , back when the BBC only wanted to give you information with no agenda
i remember watching ti to find out about micros and decided i could only really afford a spectrum but it was the first step of a journey
the nice sweets lady with her pet was brilliant she was exactly how people were fearless and curious
by the way , who misses a box of carousel at Christmas ?
Looks like the inspiration behind Look Around You. I sincerely preferred living in these days rather than nowadays.
The tall thin guy seems utterly unimpressed with everything he sees lol
You know its movie-magic called: getting to see the script before shooting.
Wow brings back a flood of Memories. Ty for posting
Love the dust cover !
OG PC Master Race
Vic 20. Oh the memories of my childhood.
Ah, Prestel, I remember you well (seeing as I worked for Telemap [MicroNet800] and BT [Information Management]).
Where'd the last 4 decades go!?!?!?!
Who knew it would lead to Girls photographing there Butts on Instagram....Aah Progress...
...and...
And - of course - funny cat videos.
I love these retro documentaries. As time goes on everything tends towards the lowest common denominator. Sure this is over simplified compared to what would be taught in a uni program, but at the very least the presentation is still upright.
I used those airline reservation services back then. Everything was still done through 300 baud dial-up modems on a phone line. Went WAY faster than it does today, almost instantaneous, because there was so little data overhead. No GUI. No paging. Just text and numeric menus.
They didn't have any aware in 8:24 about 30 years later, smartwatches and mobile phones would be more powerful than a main frame computer like that.
Another interest thing is in 22:27 when that journalist said about computers: "at the end of 20 years almost everybody will have one, or acces to one". He was almost right! Here in Brazil, today, we have more cell phones for example than people. They also had no idea about what was going to be a social netowork, and how it would change the way of people to communicate and to work.
We all need to watch more videos like this, to imagine what is going to came next.
that's awesome... a computer literate senior in the 1980's
ah they are all online these days. they are dubbed "the silver surfers"
I don't think I knew any in the 90s or the 00s.
This guy was spot on very smart man same even the idle.
21:48 - spot on!
ironically he's not using a word processor to bash out his modern classic. for a man so studied in the computer world, does seem a little strange.
its great to see an old women using a computer back then where as my mom is that age now and refuses to even use the internet.
There were plenty of folks who refused back then... many people are fearful of change and being made obsolete, when in truth it's a case of "I can't be arsed" as it is also today. People are inherently lazy and th need a kick up the backside
10:34: That the first time I see a Commodore Vic 20 in the last 30 years! That's what I learned to program on.
my god this takes me back
10:30 -> these silly games would end up being the driving force behind the power and affordability of commercial computers lol
this is actually false, it might look like that to you (a gamer) but the wast majority of computers are not used for gaming at all, also the wast majority of computer users do not use them to play games.
Are PC games the main driving force behind processor speeds? I did not know that. I just thought everyone wanted faster computers, no matter what you use it for.
Huh? That's not the case at all. Just like the show said, it costs a lot to build the first (R&D) then gets cheaper the more they make, it was mostly research and enterprise that was able to fund the progress of computers, those innovations then trickle down to the consumer at a more affordable price. This is still the way it works today with new technological innovations.
"...and this is the Cray... " what a sentence!
and to think the average smartwatch has many times the power of the cray of that time.
It can do 50 million operations per second.
That phone in your pocket is able to do 30 times that.
@@JesusisJesus that is why I said your average smartwatch. The modern phones are more powerfull than 90's cray computers.
i dont see ronnie or regie there or even babs windsor.
@@swifty1969 but does your average smart watch also double as a bench seat? 😂
I just learned that Roy Kinnear who played the computer salesman is no longer among us.
Yeah, that was a while back. Nice to see him on this, of course.
proper class act that man!
0:50 For a moment there I thought there was a modern graphics card behind him
Bruh that is a speaker
genuinely very entertaining
This definitely needs more MINITEL.
The old chocolate lady was so sweet...
ba dum tish!
13:03 bless, lol i remember using a typewriter a few times, so frustrating, but thankfully computers came along and many years later, ending up after some hard work and waiting for the vacancy to open up, worked in I. T. Support and then Server Support... Happy days!!!
And along comes the SD Card and MP3 players. She was full of foresight.
"We will not run out of silicone..." 2020: Hold my beer!
So glad I grew up in that era.
Things were so pioneering and exciting back then.
2020 and you still can't get a blue computer
This guy helped program the early Valve machines, guys. GABE NEWELL, WHERE IS HIS CREDIT?!
Love these type of things 18 year how far we have come
It is 2019. This was 37 years ago.
That opening scene was inspired by 1970s BBC sitcom "Are You Being Served?".
The weather computer at 5:00 did 50 million instructions per second. We don't measure in MIPs any more since computers are too fancy for that to make sense. Now it's operations. A GTX 4090 can do over 80 trillion operations per second.
Can’t believe it was 1982 - I was 7 years old playing games on my cousins college computer on a green screen while mom went to work and used a mainframe.
11:58 KitKat for 13p! Those were the days.
And I bet they were bigger.
And tin foil 😉
you eagle eyed bugger. are you scottish? :O hehe
Loved the story of Phyllis, brave woman!
4:55 He says 50 million instructions per second, not 50,000.
5mhz?
@@timking3587 nah 50 meeeelion instructions per sec. some instructions can take up to 13+ clock cycles on a CISC cpu! i iphone 5 can do 18,200 mips :)
8:50 I love how the technologist actually predicts the extreme miniaturization of the minicomputer; back then it was pretty common for people to assume that computers would only get bigger and bigger, and to be rather short-sighted when it came to the accessibility and portability of future technology. (And of course today in 2020 the Apple Watch is more powerful than a roomful of those mainframes!)
What does a computer do again?
That's curious....anyone know why this episode 1 of 'The Computer Programme' differs slightly from the _other_ episode 1 uploaded to TH-cam?
The difference/s being that the opening Roy Kinnear skit is completely omitted whilst Chris Searle's opening "it's happening now" monologue is filmed on location here, instead of in the studio (as in the other version)....?
Is one version an edited repeat of the other or perhaps the pilot to the series?
makara80 copyright so I changed it
The bloke at the end reminded me of Professor Bunsen Burner from The Muppets.
Anyone know the name of the watch at 8:34?
7.56 mins: what a fantastic analogy!
The set looks like Look Around You: Season 2.
Where's the Kraftwerk music (Computer World) from the start? Music Rights issue?
Watching this on my iphone 11 that is probably 10.000x faster than the mainframe at the weather center he was visiting...
Neb6 yeah there’s no understating how powerful those supercomputers were, and you can’t apply the old ‘my watch is more powerful than’ just because it was old. It had a big mass of processors.
iphone 5 has a mips rating of 18,200 mips
I wonder if Phyllis Arundale ("The Cocolste Box") is still alive and, if so, how does she feel about that program?
Rex Malik's predictions of computing power have been proven to be correct.
1982, the year movies like Blade Runner and Disney's Tron came out.
At the start there, was that the guy who played Veruca Salt's father in Willy Wonka?
In 1982, the most powerful computer in the world did 50 million instructions per second. A modern cheap desktop PC does around 300,000 million instructions per second.
Wow... what will they think of next!?
No-one in the UK had that Commodore disk drive... It cost as much as a C64
Was nearly mandatory in Germany, how otherwise could we have played Pirates! :)
There were things called rental shops, Sure you remember them like: Rumbelows, Radio Rentals, Granada TV, etc
My Auntie used to rent out her VHS player, Dishwasher from there as she couldn't afford one outright. She then bought them both after a year
I had one, and a couple of my mates did. I managed to swap a Spectrum +2 with a knackered tape drive for a used C64 and 1541, the shop was daft enough to switch the Speccy on and see it working, but didn't test the tape :)
@@Abo999 Which rental shop was that in :-)
False, we had one.
14:00 who's the man on the wanted poster?!
I remember watching this series in the 80s when I was agonising whether to buy a Spectrum or a Dragon (Spectrum won!). It all sounded a bit stilted and BBC-establishment, but at least it was about computers !
25 Yr Computer Professional (retired)
I wish we had this show when I was young but a sat dish was the price of a car back then. .. and I wish there was this quality of production today for my kids to watch instead of other kids playing roblox...
I had a TRS-80 in 1982, and I stored my Basic Programs on tapes.
i have some 1/4 inch tapes from the 1970s. no idea why. just in the attic. i think they have cobol & fortran programs on them
Reminds me of war games "Do you want to play a game?"
£64 to fly to Paris in 1982 isn't all that bad
1:15 £699 in 1982.
equivalent to £2,705.87 in 2020
Phyllis' computer would be a similar price from what I can dig up. I see what she means about it not helping financially.
"as a freelance journalist what do I need?".... "something that can hack the mobile phone of a dead child, just like Piers Morgan"
Electwonics, how pronunciations have changed!