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"The Computer Chronicles"

G

GravityCrab

Member
Joined
Jan 16, 2015
Messages
48
Location
Gainesville Florida
I was just wondering if anyone else here finds it fun and interesting to watch a few episodes of the computer chronicles every now and then? I tend to watch an episode or two every month.
 
I used to watch it when it was on TV (Saturday mornings I think). Yea, I watch a few episodes a year when I research some old gear.
 
I pop it up to listen to when I do other things sometimes, or watch it when I want to be transported back to the 80's/90's tech-wise. Kind of funny listening to Gary Kildall talk with some guy about a Tandy 1000 desktop with a 40MB HDD when the one you're typing on as you watch the show has an 8 GB HDD.

If I took any of my keepers back to the past, people would try to burn me at the stake as the creator of Skynet!
 
eeguru said:
You mean 8TB? Or you must be back in the late 90s still! :)
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LOL, I don't think my first revison XT-IDE goes up that high.....

Funny thing about an 8088 with 8GB of space (total - 4X 2GB Partitions (roughly)), there's so much of it even my Games partition has at least a gigabyte left.
 
I find the show fascinating to watch. I wasn't around for or wasn't old enough to appreciate the show when it aired(or even knew of it until recently). Some really interesting and rare computers show up from time to time and it fun to see them in use.

I find the whole presentation of it interesting. It shows what was bleeding edge at the time and how new technologies were perceived when released. I always love it when something comes on like a touch sensitive CRT that seems cool but fails commercially only to be made popular decades later. It's also cool to see how the different rivalries played out. The news portions are always cool as well.
 
I find it fun to watch them every now and then. I grew up near Silicon Valley area so we watched the show when it broadcast pretty regularly.

Great show for sure.
 
I always enjoyed seeing them for the Atari stuff and especially Jack Tramiel talking on multiple occasions. It's nice to see a lot of them from so long ago, many of which have either passed or moved on to retirement. The Virtual Reality stuff is truly fascinating, especially considering it flopped miserably in the 90's and is now suddenly re-emerging again some 20+ years later.
 
MindThreat said:
I always enjoyed seeing them for the Atari stuff and especially Jack Tramiel talking on multiple occasions. It's nice to see a lot of them from so long ago, many of which have either passed or moved on to retirement. The Virtual Reality stuff is truly fascinating, especially considering it flopped miserably in the 90's and is now suddenly re-emerging again some 20+ years later.
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I used to watch it on the air in the 90's! I LOVE going back and watching an episode from time to time. It's like a time capsule
 
Love watching these. It's interesting to see what the emerging trends were and how people perceived what the future would hold in light of looking back 30 years. There's an episode with Alan Shugart that's pretty fun... semiconductor storage will never beat hard disks in cost / byte and 3.5" disks will never replace 5.25"! Also an episode with a Xerox laser printer that's somewhere around $10-20k. For the laser. A good reality check on the limits of futurologists in any time.
 
Well, semiconductor storage still hasn't beat hard disks in cost/byte (or my notebook would have had vastly more storage..).
But 3.5" did replace 5 1/4", although relatively briefly - before floppy disks went out of fashion altogether. And, as it turned out, 3.5" HD format was and is low quality. My old 5 1/4" floppies are still good, I read two from 1985 and 1987 respectively, yesterday. No issues. None of my old 3.5" HD format are readable.
 
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