Those 80's micro's were sheer beauty. We're living the dream of computing, right now. But the times when we were dreaming of today was a far more magical experience. And what times they were, to have been alive. Possibly the greatest time in history. And some of us were lucky enough to have been there, right at the start of the computer revolution.
@@ajs41 Comments on ‘1984: Cutting-Edge PERSONAL COMPUTER Tech | Micro Live | Retro Tech | BBC Archive’ 0313am 27.10.24 we're talking computers..? 1984, maybe...? i was allowed a tawdry spectrum computer. they were old hat by then so i may as well have asked for an old beat up atari... which still ranks as best retro gaming consol the world over... we are talking computers? talking sex isn't really something i can advise on....
In case you were wondering who won the Eureka game and 25K GBP! - When the game was originally published, Domark promised a prize of £25,000 to the first player to solve the entire game before December 31, 1985. The prize was eventually won by Matthew Woodley, a teenager from the UK.Woodley would eventually go on to work for Domark.
I was at the show in 1984 , came all the way from Norway, my job paid for the flight. I was only 18 at the time. Amazing to watch this in 2024! I even took some pictures
Fascinating to look back. My late Father ( received a scholarship to St. Joseph's in Sydney, schooled with Chief Justice Murray Gleeson).....was a computer programmer from the mid 1960's to the late 1980's - self employed working for IBM , McDonald & East. Wallace Bishop Mitre 10...... I remember the reams of computer paper and cardboard cards. Fast forward to 1982, I'm in Grade 12 our school class the first to receive our first computer - 30 kids trying to learn, crowded behind our teacher.
The home computer scene was unbelievably exciting back in the eighties, new hardware developments & original game releases almost every week from maverick producers...kids today will never know such thrills now its all corporate big business pulling the strings to suit themselves.
I still remember when Ant Attack came out, never seen anything like it, and almost forgotten 6 months later because they released so many games in a year.
@@bardo0007 The Oliver Twins could churn out six games a year on the Speccy, I always thought they were just behind the Dizzy games but it seems like they also released just about any game with Simulator in the title, BMX Simulator, Jet Ski Simulator, Skiing Simulator, etc.
I was just over 20 years old back then and I remembered that it would take me at least a year to save up for an Apple computer. I don't think much has changed! 🤨
I used to work for the London Borough of Greenwich Computer Unit in the early 1980s. Me and some other newbie were shown the huge underground main computer complex beneath the town hall in Woolwich. It was fairly impressive. Then I went back to my nearly one metre wide word processing unit that had futuristic looking green text on it because there was a thin film of green plastic stuck on the front of the screen that you could peel off with your fingernail. Even then I thought it seemed a bit crap.
I remember going to the nova hotel London for one of there shows , Showing my age it may have been before than 1981 ?, I remember at that time it was full of apple 1s and PETs , But one thing I do remember is going for a coffee and see the price going out side and getting a 3 course meal cheaper .
@@AM2K2 I enjoyed it, think I came across it after enjoying Lee Pace’s performance in Foundation and looking up other stuff he had been in. I’d never thought about the Mad Men description but yeah it’s a pretty good analogy.
@@Edgel-in6bs I personally agree. I've often been slightly disappointed in general technology improvements since I was a teenager in the later 80s when compared with what was expected... Thought we were going to get somewhat more; my parents (and even my grandparents) saw more general changes in a broader spectrum of tech. In reality tech. progress is far more complex than the over simply hyped 'its accelerating' and is hugely driven by economics. Every successfully adopted new technology undergoes a rapid explosion of development for the initial years and then a maturing and gradual improvement/evolution thereafter. If you look over 100 years you can see countless examples of this: Smartphones are a tech. currently moving from explosion to maturity. Automatic (front loading) washing machines did that years ago as did jet planes etc. etc...
This stuff is fascinating 😮 even these early computers as simple as they seem by modern standards it's still pretty difficult to understand how it all works inside. I've had a difficult time learning how computers do mathematical calculations in binary 😅 & attempting to develop an 8bit game in assembly language & learning how the graphics work 🤓😵💫😵💫👨🏾💻
@@ajs41 It was the 80's. The freight to New Zealand would have cost more than the device. Also, we only knew about this stuff from magazine ads which had no way of ordering.
The infrared wireless keyboard was a rarity in the 80's. It never really catched on until much later. But that keyboard looks almost identical to the one's sold today.
Apricot were very innovative in many ways and built some great machines... built in UPS in some servers, smart card based security system built into servers and desktops etc
If you look up Computer & Video Games magazine issue 66 then Matthew explains the full story. I'd admit I still don't understand his explaination of the solution. 🤔
I took another look at this. So Matthew says the clue can be found in the Bible, Revelation Chapter 22, Verse 13, "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." Then you look for the first three occurrences of the word "the" and find the position of the first letter "t" in the sentence, counting from zero. Matthew says they occur at positions 25, 43 and 52. Total these for 120 and total the digits to get 3. So T=3 and when you have found all the other nine letters you can use this to decode a phone number. I didn't make the same counts, but there are different translations for that Bible verse, so maybe that is what is tripping me up. 🤔
Colour screen on that first monitor in 84, when I was 9, yet in secondary school in the early 90s when I started using computers, they had black and green screens, big clunky things lol. They weren't out of date, so wonder if those colour screen monitors were commercially easily available in the early 90s? God it looks so dated now, feels like a hundred years ago 😂
'Home Computers' increasingly used colour monitors (or TV's with a modulator on a more limited budget) as the 80s progressed, primarily as they were more gaming focussed. However, a lot of business computers inc. some for education purposes used black and green monitors as they were primarily for non-gaming applications. I remember having an Amiga in the late 80's with a huge leap in colour capability (4096, versus 16 in my previous Spectrum) and the ability to sample realistic sounds and combine them over multi-channels. It was then hard to understand why several years later (v early 90s) a friend's family PC had hardly any colours, much inferior graphics and only produced a few beeps. Seemed rubbish in comparison when I was a youngster, but in reality that PC had a better word processor, spreadsheet etc. and they were business market targeted.
Does anyone remember 'Future Computers' ? I knew someone that worked for them, they produced their own personal computer back in the 80's but I had never heard of them or their products before.
Apricot - "The portable part is what you see here" - th-cam.com/video/DehtUql0bUM/w-d-xo.html - proceeds to touch that portable part as if it's really small and light 😆 - it's 5.8 kg Having said that, my work issues macBook Pro M1 (16") is just over 2 kg - and I consider that a beast in this day and age. It's probably 1000x more powerful than the Apricot portable. In 40 years the pace of advancement is staggering - a BBC micro:bit is more powerful in terms of compute power than the 1984 Apricot portable. To be fair, a Raspberry Pi is more comparable in terms of hooking up to a keyboard and monitor. We take it fore-granted that a single smartphone that we put in our pockets could probably smash the performance of every computer in that 1984 PC World Show combined - as in, the total compute power of everything at that show combined. What is the next 40 years going to bring?
Beck when pcs and computing was still very much the domain of hobbyist y even the advent of the public Internet in 1994 didn’t Switch people on mass that really only came here in Australia until the arrival of tablets and touchscreen phone 15 years ago
1984: Cutting-Edge PERSONAL COMPUTER Tech | Micro Live | Retro Tech | BBC Archive 1502pm 24.10.24 indeed.... she was a very intelligent and interesting lady...
I went to a computer show at Olympia in London, in I think 1985. The thing I remember most was that someone had hired a group of topless models to walk through the crowd while someone took photos until they were stopped.
You guys have lot more of 1984 than just personal computers if you know what I mean... I mean the fact that you don't have freedom of speech any more, as in you guys are living a real dystopian... dystopia.
The days when being on the spectrum meant something else.
As did having a 5-inch floppy.
@@AtheistOrphan 5 and a quarter, if you don't mind.
@@octaviussludberry9016 Some were on the Commodore 64 or the Amstrad though innit
@@videogamebookreviews The one I had at work had an 8 incher!
Probably not.
“And we hope in 40 years time we will have handheld computers where strangers can interact and argue with each others opinions” 😂
While looking at pictures of cats.
@@Larry cats and porn, the two main drivers of the internet
Ha! That will never happen.
@@GIChow I don’t agree 😉
Those 80's micro's were sheer beauty. We're living the dream of computing, right now. But the times when we were dreaming of today was a far more magical experience. And what times they were, to have been alive. Possibly the greatest time in history. And some of us were lucky enough to have been there, right at the start of the computer revolution.
Every time I watch one of these BBC Archive things and think "that's the most '80s thing I've ever seen", they go and raise the bar one more time 😄
I was at that show, with my dad and sister. We went each year. In the 1985 show I bought Skyfox for the 64, on disc.
th-cam.com/video/0KKMu7ilix4/w-d-xo.htmlfeature=shared
Which year was the first time for you?
@@ajs41 Comments on ‘1984: Cutting-Edge PERSONAL COMPUTER Tech | Micro Live | Retro Tech | BBC Archive’ 0313am 27.10.24 we're talking computers..? 1984, maybe...? i was allowed a tawdry spectrum computer. they were old hat by then so i may as well have asked for an old beat up atari... which still ranks as best retro gaming consol the world over... we are talking computers? talking sex isn't really something i can advise on....
In case you were wondering who won the Eureka game and 25K GBP! - When the game was originally published, Domark promised a prize of £25,000 to the first player to solve the entire game before December 31, 1985. The prize was eventually won by Matthew Woodley, a teenager from the UK.Woodley would eventually go on to work for Domark.
Ah! I remember that from back in the day. Think I played one of the text-adventures, but Jetpac, Ant Attack and The Hobbit were more my thing ...
Sounds almost as iffy as the Hareraiser competition
Yes. I just heard that story told by Dominic Wheatley on the Retro Hour Podcast. They also helped him through University.
"and what is the folder called Boring Work Stuff?"
"no...don't open that file"
😂
I was at the show in 1984 , came all the way from Norway, my job paid for the flight. I was only 18 at the time. Amazing to watch this in 2024! I even took some pictures
@bardo0007 what job was that?
@@cryptocsguy9282 I worked for a dealer, we always looked for new products to sell
Amazing to see a wireless keyboard from that time.
Fascinating to look back. My late Father ( received a scholarship to St. Joseph's in Sydney, schooled with Chief Justice Murray Gleeson).....was a computer programmer from the mid 1960's to the late 1980's - self employed working for IBM , McDonald & East. Wallace Bishop Mitre 10...... I remember the reams of computer paper and cardboard cards. Fast forward to 1982, I'm in Grade 12 our school class the first to receive our first computer - 30 kids trying to learn, crowded behind our teacher.
The home computer scene was unbelievably exciting back in the eighties, new hardware developments & original game releases almost every week from maverick producers...kids today will never know such thrills now its all corporate big business pulling the strings to suit themselves.
I still remember when Ant Attack came out, never seen anything like it, and almost forgotten 6 months later because they released so many games in a year.
@@bardo0007 The Oliver Twins could churn out six games a year on the Speccy, I always thought they were just behind the Dizzy games but it seems like they also released just about any game with Simulator in the title, BMX Simulator, Jet Ski Simulator, Skiing Simulator, etc.
I was just over 20 years old back then and I remembered that it would take me at least a year to save up for an Apple computer. I don't think much has changed! 🤨
You was just over 20 I had 7 years left to be born
@@swaneknoctic9555what
Apple 🍎 is always the pricey option but one of the few from back then that's still around in the consumer space
I used to work for the London Borough of Greenwich Computer Unit in the early 1980s. Me and some other newbie were shown the huge underground main computer complex beneath the town hall in Woolwich. It was fairly impressive. Then I went back to my nearly one metre wide word processing unit that had futuristic looking green text on it because there was a thin film of green plastic stuck on the front of the screen that you could peel off with your fingernail. Even then I thought it seemed a bit crap.
I remember going to the nova hotel London for one of there shows , Showing my age it may have been before than 1981 ?, I remember at that time it was full of apple 1s and PETs , But one thing I do remember is going for a coffee and see the price going out side and getting a 3 course meal cheaper .
Chris fancies his chances with Lesley😀
Visa versa more like!
Shout out to any fans of Halt and Catch Fire
Is that worth watching? I have it on my list but I've never got around to it. I read it is like Mad Men but for tech?
@@AM2K2 I enjoyed it, think I came across it after enjoying Lee Pace’s performance in Foundation and looking up other stuff he had been in. I’d never thought about the Mad Men description but yeah it’s a pretty good analogy.
@@AM2K2 Its superb. Season 1 is excellent
@@AchtungEnglanderI agree, a very tight season. Season 2 slows down, then 3 and 4 turn into a soap, still watchable though.
I need to watch that show
I was 7 years old in 1984. It’s jaw-dropping how technology has changed. And how it has been integrated to our lives.
I was 10. Jaw-dropping indeed, and frightening.
yes and no.... great leaps in technology but to see kids and adults now with faces stuck in phoines 24/7 is sad to see
You could argue the difference between 1944 and 1984 was even more jaw dropping tho !
Ahhh the 1990s "information superhighway" which was going to liberate us all ....
@@Edgel-in6bs I personally agree. I've often been slightly disappointed in general technology improvements since I was a teenager in the later 80s when compared with what was expected... Thought we were going to get somewhat more; my parents (and even my grandparents) saw more general changes in a broader spectrum of tech.
In reality tech. progress is far more complex than the over simply hyped 'its accelerating' and is hugely driven by economics. Every successfully adopted new technology undergoes a rapid explosion of development for the initial years and then a maturing and gradual improvement/evolution thereafter. If you look over 100 years you can see countless examples of this: Smartphones are a tech. currently moving from explosion to maturity. Automatic (front loading) washing machines did that years ago as did jet planes etc. etc...
Chris Palmer is a great salesman.
I was 13 and at home programming my ZX Spectrum while this was all going on lol.
This stuff is fascinating 😮 even these early computers as simple as they seem by modern standards it's still pretty difficult to understand how it all works inside. I've had a difficult time learning how computers do mathematical calculations in binary 😅 & attempting to develop an 8bit game in assembly language & learning how the graphics work 🤓😵💫😵💫👨🏾💻
First Mac I ever used was a 512k. After the Vax2000 it was a revelation!
512 k Macintosh!!! The memory capability is mind blowing. Thats OVER half a megabyte. That’s serious capacity😂
Actually it's exactly half a megabyte, and it was hardly enough to run anything even back then. 😂
Nobody will ever need more than 640k.
This is actually the upgraded Mac. The first one had only 128k!
@@MacXpert74 If it was exactly half a megabyte would it not be 512K rather than 512k?
The moment in history when children were 'captured' by technology and catapulted into an alternative reality.
I had the Commodore 64 Music Maker. Good fun.
"I am now telling the computer _exactly_ what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate!" 🍫
Fighting Fantasy gamebooks! 4:01
Incredible how my iPhone probably has more compute power and memory than all of the computers at Micro Live combined.
Do we still have exhibitions like this? I used to love going to these things.
Yes, sometimes.
I so lusted for that Commodore Music Maker, but it was never offered in my country.
You couldn't get it shipped over?
@@ajs41 It was the 80's. The freight to New Zealand would have cost more than the device. Also, we only knew about this stuff from magazine ads which had no way of ordering.
Matthew Woodley solved the game Eureka and won the £25,000 (he went onto work for Domark the game manufacturer).
The infrared wireless keyboard was a rarity in the 80's. It never really catched on until much later. But that keyboard looks almost identical to the one's sold today.
Apricot were very innovative in many ways and built some great machines... built in UPS in some servers, smart card based security system built into servers and desktops etc
Anyone know who the person was who solved Eureka text adventure and claimed the prize?
In 1985 it was 15 year old mathew woodley
If you look up Computer & Video Games magazine issue 66 then Matthew explains the full story. I'd admit I still don't understand his explaination of the solution. 🤔
I took another look at this. So Matthew says the clue can be found in the Bible, Revelation Chapter 22, Verse 13, "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last."
Then you look for the first three occurrences of the word "the" and find the position of the first letter "t" in the sentence, counting from zero. Matthew says they occur at positions 25, 43 and 52. Total these for 120 and total the digits to get 3. So T=3 and when you have found all the other nine letters you can use this to decode a phone number.
I didn't make the same counts, but there are different translations for that Bible verse, so maybe that is what is tripping me up. 🤔
Colour screen on that first monitor in 84, when I was 9, yet in secondary school in the early 90s when I started using computers, they had black and green screens, big clunky things lol. They weren't out of date, so wonder if those colour screen monitors were commercially easily available in the early 90s?
God it looks so dated now, feels like a hundred years ago 😂
'Home Computers' increasingly used colour monitors (or TV's with a modulator on a more limited budget) as the 80s progressed, primarily as they were more gaming focussed. However, a lot of business computers inc. some for education purposes used black and green monitors as they were primarily for non-gaming applications.
I remember having an Amiga in the late 80's with a huge leap in colour capability (4096, versus 16 in my previous Spectrum) and the ability to sample realistic sounds and combine them over multi-channels. It was then hard to understand why several years later (v early 90s) a friend's family PC had hardly any colours, much inferior graphics and only produced a few beeps. Seemed rubbish in comparison when I was a youngster, but in reality that PC had a better word processor, spreadsheet etc. and they were business market targeted.
Does anyone remember 'Future Computers' ? I knew someone that worked for them, they produced their own personal computer back in the 80's but I had never heard of them or their products before.
My grandfather, grandmother, father, mother were all alive, they are now all gone.
I like how the mobile computer at the beginning has such a terrible monitor They didn’t even demo it.
The commodore music maker keyboard is cool.
Apricot - "The portable part is what you see here" - th-cam.com/video/DehtUql0bUM/w-d-xo.html - proceeds to touch that portable part as if it's really small and light 😆 - it's 5.8 kg
Having said that, my work issues macBook Pro M1 (16") is just over 2 kg - and I consider that a beast in this day and age.
It's probably 1000x more powerful than the Apricot portable.
In 40 years the pace of advancement is staggering - a BBC micro:bit is more powerful in terms of compute power than the 1984 Apricot portable.
To be fair, a Raspberry Pi is more comparable in terms of hooking up to a keyboard and monitor.
We take it fore-granted that a single smartphone that we put in our pockets could probably smash the performance of every computer in that 1984 PC World Show combined - as in, the total compute power of everything at that show combined.
What is the next 40 years going to bring?
Wow, in 1984 I could only dream of hearing American’s opinions on everything, everyday.
And no different in 2024.
@@MTCason We no longer have to dream...
So I wonder who claimed that £25,000, or is it still up for grabs 😄
The comments above explain who won it.
Proof, if it were needed, that everything was better 40 years ago
From the time when computers were not the enemy...
Computers are not the enemy. Bad ideas are.
0:28 "arse"
Did she just insult the poor boy or did she mean something else?
Perhaps she was saying "ah" and was going to say "so..." and then something else but stopped at the 's'. But I like to think she simply said "arse".
hahahaha 😆
She had the mildest form of tourette's.
What a Wally.
The £25,000 prize was eventually won by teenager Matthew Woodley, who would go on to work for Domark.
This is so old, it was before I started to hate Apple😂
who needs more than 640K of memory ?
That technology back in 1984 was developed to the extent it now serves the powers that be to lead us willingly into 1984...
Beck when pcs and computing was still very much the domain of hobbyist y even the advent of the public Internet in 1994 didn’t Switch people on mass that really only came here in Australia until the arrival of tablets and touchscreen phone 15 years ago
What kinda notes 💷 were those to make up £25,000 ?
Lady Godiva’s mate.
@@strontium-D ???
@@cryptocsguy9282 rhyming slang for fiver
👍🏾
this stuff all looks very dated and frustrating to use, not like windows xp which we have nowadays!!
Wait until you try Windows 7!
Best. OS. Ever.
Windoze 11 😂😂, xp is outdated too
@@anonUK I'm using Windows 7 right now hahaha
@Cave_Monster
I'd love to be able to use it still, unfortunately I've got software which seems to demand Win 10+
Bah... computers, they're just a fad. I don't see them amounting to much. (hahaha)
40 years on has it been brilliant? In some ways yes.
Al Pacino yesterday. Today, a young Cate Blanchet, acting the part of a TV journalist. More thespians, please.
Surely you mention lesbians😂
The days when game development studios were packed with enthusiasts and hobbyist, not activists.
1984: Cutting edge
2024: 1000 times more computing power in a wrist watch.
No xbox are ps5 back then
@scottbotham6161 At least you hate Atari kinda (cos of the NA video hame crash) while sega n Nintendo were out in Japan
He's never used a mouse has he?
Back in 1984, very few people had ever used a mouse.
@@IanFoot-sl1lp I know, but he is there as the expert.
good h♥️appy days
I don’t think in modern Britain many young lads dressed in black with sledgehammers would be too worried about that guard next to the money.
The whole idea of having a computer inside your own home is just a passing fad. Don’t fall for it!
1984: Cutting-Edge PERSONAL COMPUTER Tech | Micro Live | Retro Tech | BBC Archive 1502pm 24.10.24 indeed.... she was a very intelligent and interesting lady...
Ooh hairy chest!
😅
Leslie,when she was presenting blue peter, showed it off ,once,it was a real shock,i tell thee.
Everything was so `square` wasn’t it back then
I went to a computer show at Olympia in London, in I think 1985. The thing I remember most was that someone had hired a group of topless models to walk through the crowd while someone took photos until they were stopped.
The C64 had a bit of a curve. 2:53 I liked my Bread Bin.
What's the opposite of square?
I bough a copy of Eureka and didn't get very far with it.
Liquid Crystal Display. They should have abbreviated that if they wanted it to catch on.
"Luhsudeh? Luhsudeh on my dooovde."
something jarring about seeing his baby face and the carpet he has on his chest
A year later I left University and joined the work force ....
You guys have lot more of 1984 than just personal computers if you know what I mean... I mean the fact that you don't have freedom of speech any more, as in you guys are living a real dystopian... dystopia.
You've never read 1984, because if you had then you wouldn't think it's a book about George Orwell thinking, "What if I couldn't say slurs?"
@@joechapman8208 Ignore them, they are trying to get a rise out of you.
so early they'd yet to figure out how to actually hold a mouse....fascinating.
Leslie Judd comes over as totally disinterested in the show, typical girl!😉
‘Contractually obliged’
She a right misery, but awesome to see this brings back memories I was 17
First! Yay!