One of the first shows that we let our kid watch. The trucks have voices (sort of of) but mostly it’s just a narrator describing what machines do while they calmly do machine stuff.
I knew the guy that did the animation for mighty machines. The voices of all the characters in the first two seasons were drawn from his friends in bluegrass bands.
Shocking to see Luba Goy presenting a serious show about computers! I think most Canadians know her as a sketch comedian from her work in the Royal Canadian Air Farce.
Even back when this TV show came out, Luba Goy (and Billy Van) were known for their comedy. I kept waiting for the jokes... I expected to be laughing my head off. Instead, we get calm, serious Luba Goy and Billy Van teaching us about microcomputers.
It's like Robin Williams teaching a subject with a straight face... You want the comedy to flow.
As part of the generation who grew up along with computers (that is to say that computers were also growing up) I am concerned that this level of understanding is no longer common. What happens when not enough people remember how the foundations of our towers of abstraction work?
I would recommend the TheC64 Maxi. It’s a replica, but very faithful, and can be setup to start as a C64 would (disk and tape are emulated from USB sticks, but that’s a minor compromise).
The same thing that happens with every level of technology that eventually becomes ubiquitous enough to be considered a household appliance. How many people understand the internal workings of a combustion engine, how a telephone works, or how a microwave heats up their food?
Here's what happens, society chugs along just fine until a catastrophic event like an EMP which effectively drops them back into the Stone Age, except even worse because many people have jobs with skill sets that don't really serve a purpose outside of the modern capitalistic economy.
Not many understand but they should try. It is very fulfilling to build an engine (start with an electric motor; it’s trivial but still fulfilling). It is very fulfilling to build a computer out of basic logic gates. Or a radio out of some crap that’s definitely laying around in your house.
You are missing out not doing that; things seem like magic until you do them. Sure building a processor yourself won’t have all the branch prediction and etc as your intel/m* has, but at least you understand how it could work. Same for gpus ; you won’t be making anything close to what the state of the art is, but you’ll understand how it gets there.
I have a few 100 (I had over a 1000) original c64s I give away to kids; one of them managed to solder in more memory and make a networking card from a pi zero. It’s fun; everything is easy fixable and it Just Works. After 40 years.
One could argue it was never all that common, except for a period where the “lower level” was all that was available. Though I have seen (possibly anecdotal) interest in some microcontroller hobbying with younger geeks, including ESP32 stuff.
But this way of thinking can also be applied to other industries. What ends up happening is that specialization forms. There are still (young even) people that get into low level languages, including assembler when optimizations require it (though compilers just keep getting better).
There’s also the inevitable back and forth between abstraction, then a reversal to simplify and remove layers. You had low level (binary/assembler) higher (C), higher (java JRE, python/perl/JS and other interpreted languages) and now there’s interest in Rust, which is a bit of a modern twist on lower level programming.
You see this back and forth elsewhere. Computing work used to be done on the server side (mainframes), then distributed out to individual computers, and then back to the cloud, and next (LLMs maybe)?
all my old favorite shows: little hamster show, wishbone, whatamess, dragonball z , gunda wing, uh-oh (my friend was a contestant), video arcade top 10
I loved this show. I taught me the difference between a compiler and an interpreter a decade before the web even existed, when our school had one commodore PET. Core memory: I was in 7th grade and I got teased mercilessly for mentioning it during science class once. Ironically, the kid who teased me the most went on to become a founder of a very successful internet company in the late 90's and then retired in his early 30's and just flies around the world teaching people to surf. Grrr...
You may already realize this, but the backing track and production of the "Bits and Bytes" theme slavishly borrow from the song "Neon Lights" by Kraftwerk.
There were also several others, including some live shows, all of which can be found on the BBC's Computer Literacy Project Archive: https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/
This show was aired in Brazil while I was growing up. Dubbed, as it was common in TV back then. IIRC, it aired in my state’s educational channel.
It was weird to see computers we didn’t have access to (most Brasilian ones were TRS, Sinclair, and Apple II compatibles. No PET and no PCs just yet. And no Xerox 820 either.
For most people here I imagine Computer Chronicles is already known. It’s on YouTube and on the Internet Archive, and one of the presenters is the guy who was the Bill Gates we needed, not the one we deserved.
But, Feynman also tells this interviewer that he can't really explain how magnetic attraction and repulsion work. "I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you."
I think this is a really important part of simplified explanations. You can get pretty far explaining things to people based on the questions that come to them naturally, but eventually you’ll hit a point where understanding requires asking a very long series of the right questions. At these points you have to be willing to say “to go further in this direction, we have to cover several dozen hours of background material” rather than trying to find an immediate practical connection that doesn’t exist.
That clip was part of a longer interview with Feynman and he did a lot of those. If he were that concerned about oversimplifying or getting into circular arguments (magnets, rubber bands, elasticity, back to electromagnetism) I think he would not have done them in the first place.
I am a great admirer of Feynman and overall appreciate what he has done to explain physics and the scientific approach to the public. In this case, I wonder why he agreed to the interview at all.
Robert Frost addressed some of this is "Education by Poetry." I don't pretend to grok all of his talk but he talks about how we use metaphor to explain and understand but that metaphor has its limitations [1].
"Another metaphor that has interested us in our time and has done all our thinking for us is the
metaphor of evolution. Never mind going into the Latin word. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of
the growing plant or of the growing thing. And somebody very brilliantly, quite a while ago, said that
the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a growing thing. That is all. I know the
metaphor will break down at some point, but it has not failed everywhere."
I met Luba Goy at a comedy show many years ago. I also knew Billy Van, when Billy Van was moving to California in the 70's from Toronto, he gave me his German Shepard called Lobo. Kind of weird to see a post with those 2 people....
>And yet, they do NOT talk down to their audience. They do not dumb things down.
Reminded me of an old NBC interview with Frank Herbert that ended up in my Youtube feed a few days ago. (https://youtu.be/26GPaMoeiu4) It's pretty wild just how different the tone, language and content is to what you expect to see on big platforms or channels nowadays.
I have an ancient memory of this show wherein Billy says "Word processing? That sounds like FOOD processing!" I have not yet been able to refind this moment, even going through the YouTube archives.
But going through those videos made me wistful. It was like Mr. Wizard (of whom I was also a fan back then): concise, friendly, encyclopedic explanations of both how to do things with the computers of the day, and of how the machines actually worked. For example, explaining the CPU as a little filing clerk inside the machine who receives instructions on what to do with the numbers stored in the vast array of numbered filing cabinets (i.e., the RAM). The videos interposing the bits with Luba and Billy also had a lovely early-80s "analog aesthetic", akin to Sesame Street.
CBC also had a wonderful show call ZeD -- early 2000s, it was user generated content before anyone knew what that was. Short films, music by unknown artists, oddball animation.
They had an 'interactive website' years before YouTube existed, and the format intentionally had a lot of internet crossover. They clearly had no idea what they were doing half the time, and it was wonderful.
Whenever people reminisce about the early internet, I think of this show as a pioneer in 'new media'.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadOne of the first shows that we let our kid watch. The trucks have voices (sort of of) but mostly it’s just a narrator describing what machines do while they calmly do machine stuff.
https://youtu.be/eRDTCE7DEMY
Also here’s my favourite. The look on Morgan’s face when he delivers the punch line of the sketch is one of such supreme satisfaction.
https://youtu.be/67-GeNYShbc?si=SlvGmFnZ9akGiD7M
Happens to be that Abbott and Fergusen are alumni of my high school (where they met).
It's like Robin Williams teaching a subject with a straight face... You want the comedy to flow.
I've been shopping for a C=64 for my kid.
Here's what happens, society chugs along just fine until a catastrophic event like an EMP which effectively drops them back into the Stone Age, except even worse because many people have jobs with skill sets that don't really serve a purpose outside of the modern capitalistic economy.
You are missing out not doing that; things seem like magic until you do them. Sure building a processor yourself won’t have all the branch prediction and etc as your intel/m* has, but at least you understand how it could work. Same for gpus ; you won’t be making anything close to what the state of the art is, but you’ll understand how it gets there.
But this way of thinking can also be applied to other industries. What ends up happening is that specialization forms. There are still (young even) people that get into low level languages, including assembler when optimizations require it (though compilers just keep getting better).
There’s also the inevitable back and forth between abstraction, then a reversal to simplify and remove layers. You had low level (binary/assembler) higher (C), higher (java JRE, python/perl/JS and other interpreted languages) and now there’s interest in Rust, which is a bit of a modern twist on lower level programming.
You see this back and forth elsewhere. Computing work used to be done on the server side (mainframes), then distributed out to individual computers, and then back to the cloud, and next (LLMs maybe)?
Here is an translated interview with Wolfgang Back [2] about the early days.
[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Back
[2] https://sceneworld.org/blog/2019/07/23/video-interview-with-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Butterfield
all my old favorite shows: little hamster show, wishbone, whatamess, dragonball z , gunda wing, uh-oh (my friend was a contestant), video arcade top 10
and the most iconic of all: The Zone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1wEOoCDNmg
Fantastic show for sure.
This guy is an expert technology communicator for a non-tech crowd, even today.
Youtube killed the TVO star.
[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOtimvwAoYtnCtLiLspq_Gnng...
[2] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOtimvwAoYtlWZdX-MgnHrr-G...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rbARvOyyjUI
During one of the live shows, demonstrating e-mail, the e-mail account was hacked, probably the first hack captured on TV: https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ak7w5/as-seen-on-tv-when-ha...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J9WnHuGjZ38
It was weird to see computers we didn’t have access to (most Brasilian ones were TRS, Sinclair, and Apple II compatibles. No PET and no PCs just yet. And no Xerox 820 either.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octo-puce
Richard Feynman lecture on computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
I am a great admirer of Feynman and overall appreciate what he has done to explain physics and the scientific approach to the public. In this case, I wonder why he agreed to the interview at all.
Robert Frost addressed some of this is "Education by Poetry." I don't pretend to grok all of his talk but he talks about how we use metaphor to explain and understand but that metaphor has its limitations [1].
"Another metaphor that has interested us in our time and has done all our thinking for us is the metaphor of evolution. Never mind going into the Latin word. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of the growing plant or of the growing thing. And somebody very brilliantly, quite a while ago, said that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a growing thing. That is all. I know the metaphor will break down at some point, but it has not failed everywhere."
[1] https://www.poetrysoup.com/poetry/resources/documents/educat...
Reminded me of an old NBC interview with Frank Herbert that ended up in my Youtube feed a few days ago. (https://youtu.be/26GPaMoeiu4) It's pretty wild just how different the tone, language and content is to what you expect to see on big platforms or channels nowadays.
But going through those videos made me wistful. It was like Mr. Wizard (of whom I was also a fan back then): concise, friendly, encyclopedic explanations of both how to do things with the computers of the day, and of how the machines actually worked. For example, explaining the CPU as a little filing clerk inside the machine who receives instructions on what to do with the numbers stored in the vast array of numbered filing cabinets (i.e., the RAM). The videos interposing the bits with Luba and Billy also had a lovely early-80s "analog aesthetic", akin to Sesame Street.
They had an 'interactive website' years before YouTube existed, and the format intentionally had a lot of internet crossover. They clearly had no idea what they were doing half the time, and it was wonderful.
Whenever people reminisce about the early internet, I think of this show as a pioneer in 'new media'.