IMHO there's no market for a show like this today. With the exception of a small group of nerds/early adopters (that's us BTW) most heavy technology users are digital natives who neither need nor care to know about the nuts and bolts of their digital devices. Furthermore, most modern OSes are systemically opaque which limits what one can easily do with the software. That being said, I'm a long time Linux user and I just might be crusty and out of touch. Give me that good ol' bash prompt....so I can type startx and jump back to the present.
Well, nothing has changed much, when you want to learn programming, you can still use this old programs and then move on which is perhabs even better than trying to start with C#, as you'll learn more about the insides of a computer first, but for most of the people the computer is just a tool and without a GUI they are not even able to do one thing :D
The final remarks are far more visionary than Bill Gates 640 kB. I've read a forecast from the early 70'ies, based on some American computer scientists thoughts, that came pretty close to the situation around 1985-1990. I DO think that good tv programmes about computers COULD be made today. But producers are too scared to bore the viewers. So it would be all "pop" and no "sense". In Denmark they still talk about good use of computers in basic school (function, the basics of programming, security, law, good behaviour, errors, limits ...) but the politicians fear the price (they would have to educate the teachers but prefer to bash them). So the results always ends at: Using Word and "making a homepage".
The mosque that replaced her razed-down store is far more vibrant and culturally enriching than her revolting, diabetes-inducing 'sweet shop' anyway. Phyllis was a relic of the past and the beautiful hand of diversity swept her aside. Thank Allah!
It's amazing to see someone that age in 1981 on a computer and knowing what they're doing. I guess that's the subtext behind most of the posts! The PC ones anyway (no pun intended).
"Do I have to be a programmer mac?" "No Chris you can just buy a magazine and type in hundreds of lines of code and if you make one mistake it won't work." "Great, thanks."
Steve Furber, a chancellor at the Univ. of Manchester was a key man in the development of the BBC micro and Acorn computers (eventually became ARM - producing the king of todays processor cores that power a fair chunk of the worlds smartphones and tablets). I always found it amazing how a UK boffin of his stature with a formidable academic and industrial record pass through the streets of Manchester city centre barely noticed. Some years back if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates showed up in Market Street to buy a sandwich there would probably be gridlock from the city centre over the Pennines to Huddersfield!
"what will it be used for? most of the time it will sit idle. and hopefully, will not be used to steal movies, show porn or god forbid kill television for good"
Well, when you don't play a computer game, your computer will mostly idle, yes, it's on, but doing browsing or text work is for a modern computer like driving with 10 km/h.
This is actually a very significant part of computer history. The BBC Micro Computer featured was designed by Acorn Computers (It was already in development and was to be called The Proton) When Acorn won the contract to produce a computer for the BBC Literacy Project - it was adapted to the required specs and renamed the BBC MIcro Computer. A second processor could be added to the system via an expansion interface known as 'The Tube' Sophie Wilson of Acorn used a dual processor set up like this to design a simulation model, for a RISC CPU to power a new generation of Acorn 32-Bit machines known as 'Archimedes' That chip was called the Advanced RISC Machine or ARM, and formed an entirely new company. So that's right folks. No BBC Micro. No iPhone. It's that important.
I don't suppose there's any way we can get hold of the original digitisation for these? (before TH-cam smashed them into something like a US TV broadcast) They really need preserving, and I think I can clean up the pops and scraches, snow streaks and missing frames quite well. But for best results, it should really be converted to 50 progressive frames per second as a first step, and the (presumably) 576 interlaced fields have already been smashed into 480 progressive lines, and then blended from 50 interlaced fields per second up to 60 progressive frames per second. That _can_ be done acceptably, but not the way TH-cam does it.
They kind of talked a hell of a lot without saying anything at all in that programme. And the snobbishness about home computers and games is just pathetic. It was computer game programmers in the early 80s in Britain who stretched the capabilities and uses of early home computers to their very limits and basically drove future innovations like graphic interfaces and user-friendly applications. Thank God the teenage gamers and programmers and not the old school stuffed shirts won the day back then. I'm pretty proud that I was one of them!
"It was computer game programmers in the early 80s in Britain who stretched the capabilities and uses of early home computers to their very limits and basically drove future innovations like graphic interfaces and user-friendly applications. " you know what inspired those kids to do all that? programs like this one and the BBC computer in schools that this show inspired.. so its funny when you say "They kind of talked a hell of a lot without saying anything at all in that programme" because the show was a big deal back then.. perhaps you should be more grateful, boy
It was parents watching this programme who probably paid for their kids first computer. How many kids said it was essential for them to have a computer in order to do their homework, and then used it to program a Shoot Em Up or similar? The plus side of that was that the U.K. never experienced the "Great Video Game Crash" which happened in the USA where most parents bought their kids an Atari 2600.
I was watching Terry Stuart talk about the BBC Model B and he mentioned this show. As a kid, I'd watch anything about computers and there was one show I watched that featured the BBC computer. Of course, being in the US we didn't have access to these computers but as soon as I heard that intro theme music I knew this was the show I watched as a kid. It's so awesome to get to watch this again after so many years.
This was the year I left school and entered the IT industry, inspired by programs like this. It was the year I bought my Sinclair ZX81. I remember both the personal computers and the mainframes shown here. Even though I've been writing software ever since, I still can't get my head around how far we've come. The smartphone in my pocket is sixty times faster than the Cray-1 supercomputer from back then.
"... and you can play silly games on them." Ahhh. The arrogance of the old facing the new. Those silly games drove the coders that literally built the modern world.
I remember watching this at work back in 1982. I was an apprentice, and the managers were so excited about the computer revolution, they made sure all the apprentices saw it. Mind you, the message hadn't really sunk in: they were still telling us that "draughtsman" was a good job to aim for, little knowing that CAD would soon make that skill redundant. However, one thing that bothered me back then - and still bothers me now - is this: what did owls flying into your house in the middle of the night have to do with anything?
The owl was the logo of the BBC Micro, a computer made by Acorn in collaboration with the BBC in the year before this program was broadcast to establish computer literacy in Britain. The computer and television program coincided as part of that initiative. Clearly the owl represents education, wisdom, intelligence and erudition.
Depending on your definition "draughtsman" probably was a good job to choose. In 1981 I designed a PCB (for a helicopter) using old fashioned drafting tape etc. From then onwards I have used CAD systems. Little of what I learnt doing things the old way was wasted. Contrary to popular belief no manmade product designs itself. CAD makes it easier but someone has to understand what needs to be designed and how everything will fit together.
+allluckyseven Yes, You could actually buy this kit at one time! www.ebay.com/itm/HEATHKIT-Manual-Television-Model-GR-2001-Complete-Set-including-Schematic-/172164592857?hash=item2815cf34d9:g:QzMAAOSw8RJXC~N1
A college classmate bought a bargain £99 colour monitor for his BBC micro. The reason for the low price was that it was a bare chassis designed to fit in a computer game console like Asteroids, so he had to make his own case. So you could say that in the 1980s there were people making their own computer monitors :-)
good to see the Philips Videopac G7000 briefly, it had the first ever intel processor and i still have mine! ive just got the C7010 chess module Videopac which needed it's own Z80 processor in order to be able to play chess, the good old days of gaming!
The first time I ever used a computer was on the day of Monday, October 19, 1987. The computer I used was a BBC Micro. Now, 4 decades later, I am using technology to create innovations in autograph collecting. Computers were and always will be amazing.
50 million instructions per second to predict the weather, you say? **looks over at smartphone with several gigahertz clock speed and multiple cores, with a dedicated GPU** Impressive.
I was trying to explain "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" to my wife. "He's got this device .......... Like an iPad". What's more the Wikipedia entry for Earth is slightly more comprehensive than "Mostly Harmless".
The world was a much better place when computers had their own room (or even own building). They were operated by pretty young secretaries and watched over by awkward men in white coats. The damn things have taken over the world and most of our lives
I recall he was the resident Party Pooper predicting that computers would cause mass unemployment etc. Of course nobody would have understood it in 1981 if you told them that TH-camr and Influencer would be jobs in the future.
that street for the sweet shop made me think york, but cant be i've lived here years and cant spot it, must be a more southern city like york, dont think they would have traveled so far for a 3 minute spot
They travelled to Norway, Germany, Japan and the U.S. just for research before making this program. With computer literacy in the state it was in the U.K. at that time, if she submitted what she was doing to a phone-in, magazine or newspaper request for ideas, saying that she was doing her small business accountancy on a micro-computer in her sweet shop, both for her self and for others, then she's _exactly_ what they wanted to show, and wanted to get British small businesses and the recently unemployed from heavy industry thinking about and doing.
Did I hear that right it took that woman in the small shop several hours a night to do her book work? Before the computer came into her life and changed all that?
Schools got Government grants so weren't put off by the £400 price tag and it made sense for most schools to be using the same type of computer. I'm sure that an American could tell a similar story about the Apple II in the USA. Apart from the parents who thought buying a BBC Micro would guarantee their children a place at Oxbridge, most of the U.K. population bought Spectrums and Commodores. p.s. Check out "Micro Men" for an amusing docudrama on how Acorn won the BBC contract.
The good old days when you always used a dust cover for your precious computer rather than treating it like a disposable piece of office furniture or some garbage that just cradles your GPU, the only rhing worth Real Money
At 22 minutes in we see a grim prophecy. The story of what happened to Cray and the way the Japanese destroyed them makes shocking reading. Makes you wonder what the world would be like today if Cray continued to dominate the market.
Er, perhaps not. Cray was, and is, in a niche market at the high end of computer cost and performance. However, the company had revenue of over $525 million in 2013, employs over 1000 people (and growing) and has at least 3 of the top 10 fastest computers installed in the world (see the Top500 list), including the #2 fastest computer, behind only a one-off special system in China.Check out Blue Waters at NCSA, and Titan at Oak Ridge.
Chris Johns Yes, today. However I'm referring to 1982. The rise of Cray in the early 80s was one where they were projected to dominate the industry, but they were reliant on chips that the Japanese monopolised. The Japanese companies such as Fujitsu "chip dumped", selling the goods too cheaply for other companies to make a profit, thus putting them out of business and forcing American industries like Cray to become dependant on Japanese manufacture. It came to a point where Cray simply could not build what they wanted to keep ahead of the game thanks to overseas interference. My point is, what if that never happened? $525 million revenue might seem a lot, but with nothing to stop the projected rise of Cray, can you imagine what computing would be like?
gosunkugi Cray struggled in the 1990s because of the increasing speed of microprocessors and problems with company management, and not because the Japanese were dumping chips. The extremely expensive vector CPUs that Cray produced maxed out in the T90 at around 1.8 Gigaflops, which by the late 1990s, was not very good compared to a cluster of microprocessors (which is why all modern supercomputers are now massively parallel systems using microprocessors). Occasionally, a sale might have been lost due to a Japanese company selling a machine at a loss, but that was the exception. The end of the cold war also didn't help, at around this same time, which resulted in Cray being sold to Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 1996, and then spun out to Tera (renamed to Cray Inc.) in 2000. In terms of chips, Cray used to have a small IC fab, but those are hugely expensive facilities, and there was no way that Cray could stay in that game and keep up with Intel, AMD, MIPS and IBM with processors. So now, Cray systems use thousands (or more) of CPUs from AMD or Intel, DRAM chips from the few vendors that make memory parts, and designs and builds systems where these parts are tightly integrated with a high-speed interconnect, I/O and cooling. And in any case, I really don't see your point about what computing would be like. If what? If Cray diversified into making its own high-end microprocessors light years ahead of Intel? That was never even a remote possibility.
@@richardgregory3684 Or get the OS infected by viruses etc. Another reason would be that Microsoft would actually have to test their code themselves rather than getting the public to do it for them :-)
Jesús Zafra thank you man i was looking for theses series thank you keepers, one day i will keep lots of material like this one. Good media that should not be forgoten
Retro parody Look Around You must have been based on this as well as Tomorrow's World. Chris Serle = Peter Packard and Mac = Computer Jones. The looks at the camera Chris gives at the airport are lampooned by Serafinowicz perfectly. Also an early Olivia Colman visiting the sweetshop lady.
Forty years on. What do people use their individual, more powerful than a Cray, pocket sized computer for ? Playing Candy Crush and dissing people on Facebook :-)
Those who say "people of today don't need to know how things were before in order to operate what we have now" unfortunately confuse it with the implied, but false aspersion, "people of today wouldn't benefit from knowing how things were before in order to appreciate what we have now".
We'll probably, one day, find that our entire world is a simulation created by Phyllis.
simonpreston 😂😂
Its a real shame that there are no computer programmes like this any more.
There are retro games and you could run some old operating systems/software in an emulator, if you really want.
IMHO there's no market for a show like this today. With the exception of a small group of nerds/early adopters (that's us BTW) most heavy technology users are digital natives who neither need nor care to know about the nuts and bolts of their digital devices. Furthermore, most modern OSes are systemically opaque which limits what one can easily do with the software. That being said, I'm a long time Linux user and I just might be crusty and out of touch. Give me that good ol' bash prompt....so I can type startx and jump back to the present.
Well, nothing has changed much, when you want to learn programming, you can still use this old programs and then move on which is perhabs even better than trying to start with C#, as you'll learn more about the insides of a computer first, but for most of the people the computer is just a tool and without a GUI they are not even able to do one thing :D
The final remarks are far more visionary than Bill Gates 640 kB. I've read a forecast from the early 70'ies, based on some American computer scientists thoughts, that came pretty close to the situation around 1985-1990. I DO think that good tv programmes about computers COULD be made today. But producers are too scared to bore the viewers. So it would be all "pop" and no "sense".
In Denmark they still talk about good use of computers in basic school (function, the basics of programming, security, law, good behaviour, errors, limits ...) but the politicians fear the price (they would have to educate the teachers but prefer to bash them). So the results always ends at: Using Word and "making a homepage".
Even after 4 years your statement rings true. But still no programs unfortunately.
I looked forward to this programme every Sunday morning as a child
I want to go back in time and high five Phyllis the sweets shop owner.
Up high Phyllis! You rock!
I wonder if the shop is still there?
40 sweets suppliers! Call Palmer and Harvey luv, they deal with all the big companies and supply you cigarettes and drinks too :-)
The mosque that replaced her razed-down store is far more vibrant and culturally enriching than her revolting, diabetes-inducing 'sweet shop' anyway. Phyllis was a relic of the past and the beautiful hand of diversity swept her aside. Thank Allah!
It's amazing to see someone that age in 1981 on a computer and knowing what they're doing. I guess that's the subtext behind most of the posts! The PC ones anyway (no pun intended).
@@henrybemis8913 yes there was always a bad smell from mr patel
"Do I have to be a programmer mac?" "No Chris you can just buy a magazine and type in hundreds of lines of code and if you make one mistake it won't work." "Great, thanks."
happy days
most the time the was bug in the code somewhere even if did type it line for line perfect? 🙂
very funny. £64 to fly to Paris with BA in 1982. Today its £61!
This type of technology will never catch on
RIP Ian McNaught-Davis.
RIP Chris Serle
@@SinbadSinjinho Yes sad news indeed. Another great presenter gone.
Kraftwerk's "Computer World" is used as a theme to the series.
I was just scrolling down to see if someone had already pointed that out. :)
40 years later and here I am watching again this TV programme again! Just older now!
Steve Furber, a chancellor at the Univ. of Manchester was a key man in the development of the BBC micro and Acorn computers (eventually became ARM - producing the king of todays processor cores that power a fair chunk of the worlds smartphones and tablets). I always found it amazing how a UK boffin of his stature with a formidable academic and industrial record pass through the streets of Manchester city centre barely noticed. Some years back if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates showed up in Market Street to buy a sandwich there would probably be gridlock from the city centre over the Pennines to Huddersfield!
"what will it be used for? most of the time it will sit idle. and hopefully, will not be used to steal movies, show porn or god forbid kill television for good"
23:20 He totally called the mostly sitting idle part back then.
Well, when you don't play a computer game, your computer will mostly idle, yes, it's on, but doing browsing or text work is for a modern computer like driving with 10 km/h.
But I work on my laptop most of the day. I don't just play games on it.
This is actually a very significant part of computer history.
The BBC Micro Computer featured was designed by Acorn Computers (It was already in development and was to be called The Proton)
When Acorn won the contract to produce a computer for the BBC Literacy Project - it was adapted to the required specs and renamed the BBC MIcro Computer.
A second processor could be added to the system via an expansion interface known as 'The Tube'
Sophie Wilson of Acorn used a dual processor set up like this to design a simulation model, for a RISC CPU to power a new generation of Acorn 32-Bit machines known as 'Archimedes'
That chip was called the Advanced RISC Machine or ARM, and formed an entirely new company. So that's right folks. No BBC Micro. No iPhone. It's that important.
Nicely put. Acorn were a remarkable company.
Cannot be prouder to to be half Englishman
the golden age of computers... the late 70s, early 80s
1978 to 1985 before Microsoft got hold.... golden age of programming
Mac later suffered later with Alzheimers. Poor guy. He was great pioneer in computer education of the general public.
I bet they didn't have Prestel in the United States.
They'd only just got PRETZEL by '82.
I don't suppose there's any way we can get hold of the original digitisation for these? (before TH-cam smashed them into something like a US TV broadcast) They really need preserving, and I think I can clean up the pops and scraches, snow streaks and missing frames quite well. But for best results, it should really be converted to 50 progressive frames per second as a first step, and the (presumably) 576 interlaced fields have already been smashed into 480 progressive lines, and then blended from 50 interlaced fields per second up to 60 progressive frames per second. That _can_ be done acceptably, but not the way TH-cam does it.
bobsobol the BBC have done it
They kind of talked a hell of a lot without saying anything at all in that programme. And the snobbishness about home computers and games is just pathetic. It was computer game programmers in the early 80s in Britain who stretched the capabilities and uses of early home computers to their very limits and basically drove future innovations like graphic interfaces and user-friendly applications. Thank God the teenage gamers and programmers and not the old school stuffed shirts won the day back then. I'm pretty proud that I was one of them!
silly games ;)
"It was computer game programmers in the early 80s in Britain who stretched the capabilities and uses of early home computers to their very limits and basically drove future innovations like graphic interfaces and user-friendly applications. " you know what inspired those kids to do all that? programs like this one and the BBC computer in schools that this show inspired.. so its funny when you say "They kind of talked a hell of a lot without saying anything at all in that programme" because the show was a big deal back then.. perhaps you should be more grateful, boy
It was parents watching this programme who probably paid for their kids first computer. How many kids said it was essential for them to have a computer in order to do their homework, and then used it to program a Shoot Em Up or similar? The plus side of that was that the U.K. never experienced the "Great Video Game Crash" which happened in the USA where most parents bought their kids an Atari 2600.
I want to be the grandchild of that awesome programmer grandma!
Finally.. great to see this. I was 6 when I used to sit in front of Tv and just listen to the music and see the Owl mascot..❤️❤️❤️
I was watching Terry Stuart talk about the BBC Model B and he mentioned this show. As a kid, I'd watch anything about computers and there was one show I watched that featured the BBC computer. Of course, being in the US we didn't have access to these computers but as soon as I heard that intro theme music I knew this was the show I watched as a kid. It's so awesome to get to watch this again after so many years.
True story: Phyllis closed the shop, changed her name to Satoshi Nakamoto, and took up programming full time.
Remember watching this series when it came out in 1982. Great to watch it again.
Keith Zerna I'm with you. I was so excited at this dawn of a new age. I was 15 and wanted to learn all about it
This was the year I left school and entered the IT industry, inspired by programs like this. It was the year I bought my Sinclair ZX81. I remember both the personal computers and the mainframes shown here. Even though I've been writing software ever since, I still can't get my head around how far we've come. The smartphone in my pocket is sixty times faster than the Cray-1 supercomputer from back then.
What's this? A programme about technology with a Kraftwerk intro? How unlikely!
essential viewing back in the 80s.
Love the old dear taking the dust cover off her computer every time she uses it.
It is hard to believe this is over 30 years old now. I remember watching these when they were first on.
"... and you can play silly games on them."
Ahhh. The arrogance of the old facing the new. Those silly games drove the coders that literally built the modern world.
And just think what they could have done if they hadn't wasted so much time on games.
I remember watching this at work back in 1982. I was an apprentice, and the managers were so excited about the computer revolution, they made sure all the apprentices saw it. Mind you, the message hadn't really sunk in: they were still telling us that "draughtsman" was a good job to aim for, little knowing that CAD would soon make that skill redundant. However, one thing that bothered me back then - and still bothers me now - is this: what did owls flying into your house in the middle of the night have to do with anything?
could symbolise knowledge coming to you from the world through your screen? probably something like that
The owl was the logo of the BBC Micro, a computer made by Acorn in collaboration with the BBC in the year before this program was broadcast to establish computer literacy in Britain. The computer and television program coincided as part of that initiative. Clearly the owl represents education, wisdom, intelligence and erudition.
Depending on your definition "draughtsman" probably was a good job to choose. In 1981 I designed a PCB (for a helicopter) using old fashioned drafting tape etc. From then onwards I have used CAD systems. Little of what I learnt doing things the old way was wasted. Contrary to popular belief no manmade product designs itself. CAD makes it easier but someone has to understand what needs to be designed and how everything will fit together.
That last speech was epic.
Man was this guy wrong about the computer being parked like the car... People are on this all day.
...Who until ten years ago would be making their own TV sets.
Wait, what?! People would actually build their own tvs in the 70s?!
+allluckyseven Yes, You could actually buy this kit at one time! www.ebay.com/itm/HEATHKIT-Manual-Television-Model-GR-2001-Complete-Set-including-Schematic-/172164592857?hash=item2815cf34d9:g:QzMAAOSw8RJXC~N1
A college classmate bought a bargain £99 colour monitor for his BBC micro. The reason for the low price was that it was a bare chassis designed to fit in a computer game console like Asteroids, so he had to make his own case. So you could say that in the 1980s there were people making their own computer monitors :-)
I'd like to see what would happen nowadays if I cancelled a reservation 5 mins before departure with a major airline!
OH MY GOD KRAFTWERK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
0:46 Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard. Business, Numbers, Money, People :D
“I find playing games on a computer degrading...”
Someone would feel very silly in 2019
(Goes back to listing to this while playing “Civilization VI”)
good to see the Philips Videopac G7000 briefly, it had the first ever intel processor and i still have mine! ive just got the C7010 chess module Videopac which needed it's own Z80 processor in order to be able to play chess, the good old days of gaming!
+Iain Batchelor actually if i remember right the videopac used the 8085... possibly the 8008. the first intel processor was the 4004.
Phillis the sweet shop lady / computer wizard - RIP.
I came here for Phyllis RIP
RIP bbc computer programme TV co-presenter Chris, a program that will be remember for ever RIP
The first time I ever used a computer was on the day of Monday, October 19, 1987.
The computer I used was a BBC Micro.
Now, 4 decades later, I am using technology to create innovations in autograph collecting.
Computers were and always will be amazing.
computers took my landlords job at the pru in london in 2000 lol great invention anyhow.
15 year old uses unbelievable brain and memory power to ...watch porn and anime...sigh...
wow..found this ..I never knew what it was called, saw it as a child in 82...so happy, going to watch them all!
Chris Searl's head was tiny! He looked like Beaker!
God the music is killer awesome. lol
It's Kraftwerk, Computer World! It is cool isn't it!!!
Yeah it is pretty cool, unfortunately it's only the little part that they used that I really like lol.
Kraftwerk song
Never really thought about kraftwerk doing the theme tune
God I remember learning to Program on a BBC Micro Computer good old days
At 23:22 "... you're going to find that most of the time that computer's going to sit there idle ..."
+DataWaveTaGo He missed entertainment, gaming and... porn...
Oh god the Kraftwerk intro music is awesome
Air travel not quite the same now. You can't cancel a ticket at the last minute or get to the airport and only then pay for your reservation!
but at least it doesn't cost £1000 to fly London to Paris
Calling 2017 from the pandemic-ridden world of the future ... now you can't fly at all!
50 million instructions per second to predict the weather, you say?
**looks over at smartphone with several gigahertz clock speed and multiple cores, with a dedicated GPU**
Impressive.
Yeah, 11 trillion operations per second on my iphone12. Carry it around in my pocket. Minds would have been blown back then. :)
My mum looked at me in shock when i told her i paid 1200 for an apple
It's interesting that linux fulfilled that computer "revolution" to most of the worlds population in the form of Android and ARM.
The presenter is 6 feet 10. True
Wrong, 6ft 4. Met him back in 86 when he was doing Making The Most of The Micro for BBC. Very nice guy
Great Kraftwerk intro...
If the people in 1982 could be shown an IPhone or IPad they would wet themselves.....
And they would faint if they saw all the obese people of today.
Touch screens had already been invented in 1982. They were available to use at EPCOT Center in Florida.
I was trying to explain "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" to my wife. "He's got this device .......... Like an iPad".
What's more the Wikipedia entry for Earth is slightly more comprehensive than "Mostly Harmless".
I watched this as a teen...now watching on my iPad it's profound
The world was a much better place when computers had their own room (or even own building). They were operated by pretty young secretaries and watched over by awkward men in white coats. The damn things have taken over the world and most of our lives
The bloke near the end who is writing about computers and he is using a mechanical typewriter!
I recall he was the resident Party Pooper predicting that computers would cause mass unemployment etc. Of course nobody would have understood it in 1981 if you told them that TH-camr and Influencer would be jobs in the future.
that street for the sweet shop made me think york, but cant be i've lived here years and cant spot it, must be a more southern city like york, dont think they would have traveled so far for a 3 minute spot
They travelled to Norway, Germany, Japan and the U.S. just for research before making this program. With computer literacy in the state it was in the U.K. at that time, if she submitted what she was doing to a phone-in, magazine or newspaper request for ideas, saying that she was doing her small business accountancy on a micro-computer in her sweet shop, both for her self and for others, then she's _exactly_ what they wanted to show, and wanted to get British small businesses and the recently unemployed from heavy industry thinking about and doing.
I suppose poor old Phyllis is now passed on and her sweet shop is now a Halal Grocery or something...RIP....
Did I hear that right it took that woman in the small shop several hours a night to do her book work?
Before the computer came into her life and changed all that?
❤ Phyllis
Wow! The whole series. Many thanks. It makes my work so much easier. Now I'll go looking for Making the Most of the Micro and Micro Live. Many thanks.
Wow making the most of the micro!!!! Forgot about that one
Thought it was the beginning of Bananaman for a moment.
I didn't like that cartoon. The animation was sloppy & the voices grated.
Excellent programme. Good old non-advertising BBC somehow get every school in the UK by 1986 to have a BBC Model B!!
Schools got Government grants so weren't put off by the £400 price tag and it made sense for most schools to be using the same type of computer. I'm sure that an American could tell a similar story about the Apple II in the USA.
Apart from the parents who thought buying a BBC Micro would guarantee their children a place at Oxbridge, most of the U.K. population bought Spectrums and Commodores.
p.s. Check out "Micro Men" for an amusing docudrama on how Acorn won the BBC contract.
My school had tonnes of Model Bs. They had a few Atoms, too, & a big Apple of one type or another.
The good old days when you always used a dust cover for your precious computer rather than treating it like a disposable piece of office furniture or some garbage that just cradles your GPU, the only rhing worth Real Money
At 22 minutes in we see a grim prophecy. The story of what happened to Cray and the way the Japanese destroyed them makes shocking reading. Makes you wonder what the world would be like today if Cray continued to dominate the market.
Er, perhaps not. Cray was, and is, in a niche market at the high end of computer cost and performance. However, the company had revenue of over $525 million in 2013, employs over 1000 people (and growing) and has at least 3 of the top 10 fastest computers installed in the world (see the Top500 list), including the #2 fastest computer, behind only a one-off special system in China.Check out Blue Waters at NCSA, and Titan at Oak Ridge.
Chris Johns Yes, today. However I'm referring to 1982. The rise of Cray in the early 80s was one where they were projected to dominate the industry, but they were reliant on chips that the Japanese monopolised. The Japanese companies such as Fujitsu "chip dumped", selling the goods too cheaply for other companies to make a profit, thus putting them out of business and forcing American industries like Cray to become dependant on Japanese manufacture. It came to a point where Cray simply could not build what they wanted to keep ahead of the game thanks to overseas interference. My point is, what if that never happened? $525 million revenue might seem a lot, but with nothing to stop the projected rise of Cray, can you imagine what computing would be like?
gosunkugi Cray struggled in the 1990s because of the increasing speed of microprocessors and problems with company management, and not because the Japanese were dumping chips. The extremely expensive vector CPUs that Cray produced maxed out in the T90 at around 1.8 Gigaflops, which by the late 1990s, was not very good compared to a cluster of microprocessors (which is why all modern supercomputers are now massively parallel systems using microprocessors). Occasionally, a sale might have been lost due to a Japanese company selling a machine at a loss, but that was the exception. The end of the cold war also didn't help, at around this same time, which resulted in Cray being sold to Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 1996, and then spun out to Tera (renamed to Cray Inc.) in 2000. In terms of chips, Cray used to have a small IC fab, but those are hugely expensive facilities, and there was no way that Cray could stay in that game and keep up with Intel, AMD, MIPS and IBM with processors. So now, Cray systems use thousands (or more) of CPUs from AMD or Intel, DRAM chips from the few vendors that make memory parts, and designs and builds systems where these parts are tightly integrated with a high-speed interconnect, I/O and cooling. And in any case, I really don't see your point about what computing would be like. If what? If Cray diversified into making its own high-end microprocessors light years ahead of Intel? That was never even a remote possibility.
Why cant Windows 11 be stored in rom chips - it would be quicker to load than from hard disk or solid state disks!!
Because you could not update and patch it, for one.
@@richardgregory3684 Or get the OS infected by viruses etc. Another reason would be that Microsoft would actually have to test their code themselves rather than getting the public to do it for them :-)
@@MrDuncl I think not having software updates from the company is a WAY bigger issue.
This was a good time for a kid i got a CPC 464 for "Education" all i did was play games.
I wonder how many takes they did talking about Stonehenge. Judging by the put on laughing, several
I've decided I want to fly to Paris...
One Ticket?
Hmmmmm.
Oh what a shame. LOL
Rex was right.
2024 I'm watching this on my Android phone which of course is a computer.
In part due to this, the Uk quickly became oen of the most computer owner and literate places in the world. And we threw it all away.
The year the spectrum was born.
Chris serle was on the tv alot, especially that's life.
Jesús Zafra thank you man i was looking for theses series
thank you keepers, one day i will keep lots of material like this one. Good media that should not be forgoten
11:30 I wish he'd said a floppy disk is more flexible than a cassette :)
Awesome intro & outro tune.
The gray supercomputer was a beast,sohow does it compare with the iphone 7?
Either way it's amezing.
johneygd Kray you mean. A modern smartphone is several orders of magnitude more powerful than the Kray 1
Retro parody Look Around You must have been based on this as well as Tomorrow's World. Chris Serle = Peter Packard and Mac = Computer Jones. The looks at the camera Chris gives at the airport are lampooned by Serafinowicz perfectly. Also an early Olivia Colman visiting the sweetshop lady.
"One day you'll have that same power in a chip as you have in this mainframe. And maybe in very few years"
6:20 Bob Hoskins narrating the commercial.
Chris Serle died just recently. RIP.
Sacrifice a politician seeing they have no prom sacrificing everybody else in their wars.
Forty years on. What do people use their individual, more powerful than a Cray, pocket sized computer for ?
Playing Candy Crush and dissing people on Facebook :-)
Candy Crush was already around in those days, under various different names.
1:45 The music sounds like something out of the FF series
RIP Chris Serle, 1943 - 2024
£64 in 1982 would be about £230 today. A lot of money for a one hour flight from London to Paris.
Kraftwerk for the theme tune.
How cool is that?
The better the faster computer then 40 years ago.😎
I was not expecting kraftwerk
everything looks shite lol its fun to watch
Does anyone know the track at around 9’18’’? Thanks!
If you contact the Beeb, they will likely tell you.
4:55 - Ave Omnissiah!
Heh, I was 5 and not far off receiving my first real computer to replace my Philips G7000.
Thanks for the upload although it’s on iplayer now
Computers were so good to enjoy and work on back then. I did programming to the BBC Micro B and Master models. Then on the Amstrad PCW8526 and PCW8512
it was great and inspiring to me as teen boy... : )
this is amazing i love pcs this is great (personal computers) are wonderful machines!!!!! i love them all (all of them) i love sooo much
Those who say "people of today don't need to know how things were before in order to operate what we have now" unfortunately confuse it with the implied, but false aspersion, "people of today wouldn't benefit from knowing how things were before in order to appreciate what we have now".
Welcome back to the Joy of Computer Programme. I'm Bob Ross, and today we're ...
This stark sobering intro is much better than the comedy sketch with Roy Kinnear of Porridge fame.
Ronnie Barker?
@@liverush24 Yup :)