BBC The Computer Programme 1982 #03

[Puppyjans]

omg see the size of that floppy disk

wish i was born then the golden age

[nzo1]

Isn't that an ME-29 computer?

[Nadeeja94]

DOS computers were able to play video? I'm impressed..

[Snuffomatica]

Watching video on a computer? It'll never catch on!

[walter0bz]

1:45 - LP-ROM drive

[sputukgmail]

I remember earlier than this reading scifi stories which were almost pure speculation of such things so that when it eventually became possible in the 80s, it already felt like living in the future. At the time, I saw this and imagined a future somewhat like the Internet now (except without the better graphics or the social web...or the hyper links...ok, not actually that much like the Internet except that you'd be able to find anything on it :) at the time, computing felt genuinely revolutiona

[jacolley]

Very good but my 11 year old daughter doesn't believe it

[stevebasset]

Wikipedia cica. 1982.

Nah, it will never catch on.

[paulj0557]

Actually the giant CD was a common laserdisc if I'm not mistaken. We now can pack many times more data on a DVD than that laserdisc. I'm sure many of you younger folks don't even remember that the recordable CD is relatively new. In fact as late as the early 90's there were only two plants in the U.S. that could even put music and software data on a CD. Not only was their a high rejection rate all data had to be burned in as part of the manufacturing, not just recorded onto like a tape.

[Dangoxs]

omg..

a prehistoric CD!

OO

i can see the past future in the makin'!

[clairesreelymovin]

very very awsome to see the first incarnation of the multimedia CD origionated WAAAAY back in 82!

[agghtee]

You've got to love the BBC. If I remember correctly (!) the BBC Model B (which they were flogging to schools) had a multi operational capacity and proven LAN connectivity (ECONET ?).

[cosine303]

yep it was network.. ermm bnc connectors if memory serves.. the one in my school kept crashing as the hard drive was rubbish and we couldn't do our GCSE computer course work.. the bar stewards!!!! same with the rubbish RM nimbus when I went to college =/

[darkalligator]

wow , is like putting the disc in the dishwasher :) . ill try that. Just kidding, is amazing how technology evolves

[TruthandJustice101]

I predict that ONE DAY, we will all be able to look into a TV screen device, using a typewriter device, and retrieve stored video from past TV shows.

Dare to dream!

[JonnyInfinite]

lmao

[joecool280]

@TruthandJustice101 Far out man! That will never happen, the storage requirements must be literally hundreds of megabytes! We will never achieve that kind of storage capacity!

[stoneybridger]

umm a lazer disc holding 3gig in 82, we've not come tthat far in 27 years, wonder if the tech was held back, for the cdr? makes ya think abit!

i remember reading about a new type of "blue" lazer that was around just as dvds came out this blue lazer was many times finer than existing lazers and could write several times the size of a dvd on a single disc mmm remind anyone of blueray?

[tkoizumi]

You're right on the money! Noticed back in the day the computers were sold by 33mhz then to 66mhz and so on. They still do to this day. All these talk about HD technology now, not many know that HD was around long before but were on computer. You gotta be smart and not let these corporate bastard take our money lol

[gomemdesoto]

Anyone know what that minicomputer actually is? To me it looks very much like a Prime, its certainly got the Prime colour scheme.

[stoneybridger]

it's a bbc micro, used alot in uk schools in the mid 80's i remember them well! it was preceeded by the legendry acorn archimedes, they still use a bbc emulator to do teletext on tv

[gomemdesoto]

I was referring to the orange and beige minicomputer with disk drive seen at 1:30-2:00. Prime was a US based minicomputer manufacturer from Natick, MA, active between c. 1972-1991. Orange and beige was their colour scheme at the time.

Thing is, as the BBC at the time was heavily used in schools, as was the Archimedes. Primes where very often used in the computing depts. of UK polytechnics around the same time

Perhaps I should have made it more more obvious with my original post :)

[gomemdesoto]

"Anyone know what that minicomputer actually is? To me it looks very much like a Prime, its certainly got the Prime colour scheme."

Finally identified the orange and beige minicomputer with disk drive shown at 1:50. It's actually an ICL ME29 with separate mag tape unit and disk drive. Made in 1980-84, and is compatible with the ICL 2966 mainframe computer.

ICL a well known British mainframe & minicomputer maker at the time eventually became part of Fujitsu.

[wisteela]

That computer controlled video disc set up is very impressive for it's time. I love the BBC Micro.

[EvilMonkey012]

wow, one megabyte, that's like... crazy...

[dummyspitter]

size of them hard drives haha state of the art back then

[bakhtn]

lol look at the size of that cd.

[harleysmurf666]

That filing cabanet was 1mb! Pretty good for the day though. :)

[Stevenup7004]

I just burst out laughing when he pulled out the Laser Disc XD, and I laughed even harder when I saw the pile of books XD

[maxerhard]

I saw a later equivalent of this at school, mid 90's although I think it had been kicking around a bit before I saw it. It was an MS-DOS PC where the VGA out would pass through a Philips LaserDisk player before reaching the monitor. An RS232 connection allowed the PC to act as a transport for the LD machine. As well as playing the video it could do various overlay tricks, video in window with graphics etc. The believe the software was made by VideoLogic.

[timelleb]

this was no trick they did, the laser disk was used as a storage device and the access time was as quick as any cd-rom. This technology just wasn't fully utilized till later for some reason.

[WiAmp]

dear xiao .. i was talking about hardware for private users. such a mpg decoder card was thousands of dollars in 1992.

My 486DX33 was approx 3000$ back then.

Well ... notice the sounds from 1:30 to 1:37 *ggg* hahaha :o) really wikkid harddisk !

[WiAmp]

well ... despite of the technology of the time ... in the end that there is a video playing on this ancient machine is quite impressive !!

Im sure this Video playing on a computer was quite impressive at the time.

[Xiaopang3333]

i think that was a video editing trick. they did that several times in other parts of the show. the video started so fast that it's really unlikely that te computer really played it, especially considering the poor performance of the system in general and the slow access times of the video disc

[WiAmp]

thats exactly what i want to point out.

If THIS is true ... it would be really amazing.

the first videos i saw was on windows 3.11

back in 1993. It was unpossible to pay them

fullscreen with my Cirrus 1MB VLB GPU.

So i guess youre right and this is just a lousy trick.

[Xiaopang3333]

well thats not entirely true. it was possible back then. you needed an mpeg-decoder card, which came out in 1991 i think. if you read the computer requirements on old video cd's, they all say that you need that in order to play the movie. of course in 1982 there was no such hardware. still, they called the disc "video disc", so i wonder if there even existed players for it back then.

[rb3m]

It's not a trick. Simply the video is not playing from the computer but from the video disc. The computer only tells the vd player what to play and when to stop. There is simply no way to hold even one frame in 32KB but it is relatively straightforward to pass commands and then have a signal mixer to display the video on the monitor. Although the Amiga computer was able to play full motion video in the mid-80s.

[numpty1972]

I don't think so, the footage is being played from the studio gallery. You can hear Chris cueing this by saying "This is what you get" for the picture, and "Doing that!" for the video footage. All you need is a signal switcher, and someone who knows whats going to happen to operate it at the right time.

[rb3m]

Of course they could have done that, but it was unnecessary. Computers back then really could "play" video by sending commands to a video player. That's how it was done for interactive kiosks in museums, fairs and the like. I still got to see a few back in 1983, 84. The reason personal computers of the day didn't do it at home was because of the extremely high cost of a video disc player. Early CD-ROMS allowed the PC to play "digital" audio in pretty much the same way, before sound cards.

[rb3m]

Although, they were talking about the future capabilities of computers, so to make it more "futury" they could have certainly used a bit of trickery.

[brhodes0]

bigants - many many thanks for uploading this. I don't know for sure but I wouldn't be surprised if the BBC had wiped their tapes of the programme and your tape might be the only copy. all the best

[Xiaopang3333]

his "tape" is nothing more than a rip which you can download all over the web.

[ArmySupa]

lol TV back then was cool now it like WAAAAAAAAAA WAAAAAAAAAAA PROGRANDGA BY CNN AND FOX LOL RED Eye ON FOX ARE FAGS REMEMEBER THAT

[fanaticdestroyer]

One million bytes equals one megabyte, haha.

The encylopedia of the future = Wikipedia.

[selfreflectionII]

no it doesn't

[horsefd]

Well, it is pretty damn close.



1 000 000 bytes = 0.953674316 megabytes.

What do you reckon?

[selfreflectionII]

sorry my bad - I meant to say

'no it ISN'T'

meaning wiki is not the encylopedia of the future - at least I hope it's not as it's full of errors and misinformation (although it can be very useful too!)

[selfreflectionII]

Anyway, I watched an hour of these old clips and it was v. interesting. Although ignorant in many ways (understandably) I like their general attitude of 'micros' being a 'strange and powerful new invention' .. these days we've lost all that awe (and respect?).

[selfreflectionII]

...... Maybe the best example currently is facebook - just check this video out!

watch?v=ZMWz3G_gPhU

[YTVoIP]

Real Foundation Stuff...

[jinnantonnixx]

Thanks for uploading this - a real blast from the past. Brilliant stuff. Educational and entertaining science - not much danger of that nowadays!

[captainhairman]

I loved watching stuff like this in the early 90's now TV is just full of junk.

[stormsunrider]

Superb - just superb. What I wouldn't give to have the DVD box set of this!!! What a hope!

[bigants]

I'm afraid this is all I have. I found it on an old VHS tape while cleaning out a cupboard. I'd also love to see this series again. The producer of this series, Paul Kriwaczek says "I believe that the National Film and Television Archive at the BFI has copies of the first and second series of (The Computer Programme.) check the British Film Institute web site. They may have copies."

[wisteela]

@bigants Be great to see.

[therealcaldini]

History and Entertainment. Why doesn't the BBC make programmes like this any more?