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BBC Releases Computer History Archive (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A slice of computing history has been made public, giving people the opportunity to delve into an archive that inspired a generation of coders. The Computer Literacy Project led to the introduction of the BBC Micro alongside programs which introduced viewers to the principles of computing. It included interviews with innovators such as Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak. The BBC hopes the 1980s archive will encourage today's youngsters to become involved in computing. With the release of the archive, viewers can now search and browse all of the programmes from the project. The archive includes 267 programs, and 166 BBC Micro programs that were used on-screen.
What are women going to learn from a bunch of old white men?
However, you should definitely save and duplicate anything you might find interesting because the BBC loves taking its own stuff down without notice. This ought to be mirrored on the Internet Archive
Some highlights for me are
Micro Live S02E09 - History of computer memory. Including the protein from mud that may one day store 100GB.
The computer music one "If I had a hammer"
The live hack someone did on their email account.
MIPS processor is somewhere in here and the transputer
https://computer-literacy-proj...
I mean, come on. That doesn't exactly roll off your tongue.
Just watched the first episode of Electric Avenue and it was pretty great. Giant space voyage simulator with CG view screen, computer usage in the field by archeologists, and a blind woman who runs some sort of graphics design company (!) using microcomputer accessibility devices. Lots of neat footage. https://computer-literacy-proj...
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
Anybody else read that as "Big Black Cock"? British Broadcasting Co should really change their name. When I google BBC, I get pages and pages of giant black peckers.
we might still have an old home computer hidden somewhere that we still use for fun every now and then, but young people? not so very much. you only need to look at some youtube video's of kids being introduced and trying out a C64, most of them think it is horrible.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Some good animation on the later Fairchild and the former employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://computer-literacy-proj...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I picked a clip at random and it âstarredâ(TM) a very young James Burke.
How cool is that?
The BBC Micro was one of the most expensive 8-bit micros sold in the 80's in the UK (perhaps the TRS-80 and Apple II were the only pricier options, although they're American of course), but it was still the best 8-bit micro ever (IMHO) from a hardware and built-in OS/BASIC point of view. The price meant it never sold in huge numbers (the ZX Spectrum massively outsold it despite being enormously inferior in every single department - it "won" because the cheap price meant more games were developed for it even though many of those games looked and sounded awful due to the severe limitations of the Spectrum).
I'm old enough to have watched all the original shows mentioned here when they first aired and they were reasonably good, though obviously never got into the highly technical stuff (like the built-in 6502 assembler that was just simply great). Of course, I moved onto the Acorn Archimedes later on, which was just as impressive for its time (the first mass market device in the world to use an ARM chip for those not in the know) and equally as relatively expensive as the BBC Micro was, unfortunately (so again, suffered from low sales, despite being a superb machine).
Sadly, the closest the BBC get now to their 80's computer shows is "Click", which is usually buried on the BBC News channel (I don't even bother tuning that in on my TV!) and mostly just airs what you've probably already read/viewed on the Web already. I really miss the live editions of "Tomorrow's World" though - nothing better than getting early demos of new tech with the live possibility of utter failure (which happened regularly, much to the joy of the viewers :-) ).