The Computer Chronicles was a TV show that ran from the early 80s through the early 00s. Over it's nearly 20 year run, The Computer Chronicles covered nearly every facet of the newly developing Computer industry. It was hosted by people with Opinions.
The guests were, frequently, people who were proud of the things they made, or the software they represented.
Watching the developer of CP/M and DR DOS talk to a mainframe engineer who worked at IBM in the 50s about the future of computers as seen from the 1980s was eye opening.
On the one hand, this show serves as an excellent introduction to, or reminder of, the capabilities of computers 35 years ago. It helps us see how far we've come in terms of miniaturization, while also demonstrating again that, in many ways, there is nothing new under the sun.
Before the advent of the internet, reporters were writing their stories on laptops and sending them in over phone lines, 25 years before the release of the iphone HP released a computer with a touchscreen, three years before microsoft released he first version of windows Apple and Visicorp demontrated GUIs wih features that Windows wouldn't be able to approach for another 9+ years.
And, of course, I'm reminded again of Douglas Engelbart's 1968 "Mother of all Demos", in which he demonstrated the mouse, the GUI, instant messaging, networked gaming, and basically every other important development of the following 50 years.
It took 5 years for Xerox to refine and miniturize Engelbart's ideas to the point that they thought they could market them, and another 10 years before Apple refined and further miniturizaed the same ideas, and brought us the Mac.
Nothing is ever new.
@ajroach42 I'm kind of sad that one part of that demo never caught on, that being the chording keyboard. Having a one handed chording device makes quite a bit of sense when combined with a mouse in the other hand.
@LilFluff yes! The cykey or the microwtiter made good strides here and then disappeared.
@ajroach42 my sister used to regularly use a brailler which gave me a bit of a bug for the idea at a young age (if you haven't seen one, there are 8 regular keys (for the 6 and 8 dot varieties of braille), a space bar, and on some models a single character advance/backspace keys or else a clutch&slider to move along the line. If you want to type an "r" you simultaneously press keys 1, 2, 3, and 5 to emboss those dots at the current position.)
@ajroach42 with the six dots of English Braille you can type all 26 letters of the alphabet, numbers, punctuation, and several common two and three letter combinations. Numbers are done using a character that says the following is a number and then a-j are reused for the ten digits. Likewise there's a capital sign that says the following letter is a capital. So despite six dots only having 64 combinations, standardized English Braille has around 250 'characters'.
