BBC Computer Literacy Project - all shows online now

[Sabreman]

What's all that shit at 2:45 

[Sureshot]

Just watched Ep. 10 of The Computer Programme - fascinating insight into the ridiculous way that banks used to process paperwork, the workforce must have been colossal! Interesting to hear the general musings about automation from the time period as well.

[Sureshot]

Seeing a trend in The Making of the Micro with Mac and his guest experts.

 

Expert: 'Hey Mac, check out this innovative application of our incredible fledgling microcomputer technology!'

Mac: 'That's it? That's a bit crap, isn't it?'

Expert: 'Erm... well... I suppose so. But watch when I press this button!'

Mac: 'Fair enough, not complete crap then. But you could've done this part better.'

Expert: '...'

Mac: 'Thanks Expert. Moving onto... oh FFS, computer games? Where's my agent?'

 

Still loving going through these. Just watched the part with the hackers on the first live show - perhaps the most polite hackers ever, in fact. Lots of nervous chuckling all round.

[Sureshot]

Just bumping this in case anyone missed it the first time around, as it’s still brilliant. I’ve managed to get back to watching these during lockdown (up to S2 E11 of Micro Live currently) - just such a great window back into the industry and world back then.

 

Something that continues to be refreshing is they are consistently forward-thinking. They are under no illusions about the inevitability that the groundbreaking-for-the-time technology they’re covering is very swiftly going to become obsolete and discuss this in quite sensible ways (not in terms of some unrealistic utopian future world).

 

They have just started covering the Amiga and PC compatibles now - roll on 1986!

[Vimster]

One of the best episodes of Micro Live is where they visit this BT research centre and get demos of digital TV and digital video calls. The benefits of digital TV were demonstrated well, how it took a fair degradation of the signal before the picture was lost. And the video call was great, using up 16 phone lines to cope with the bandwidth, and they showed how they only send the changes in picture data. All this we totally take for granted today but back then it was the future.