All About Polymorphics (1960) [video]

vimeo.com

46 points·th0ma5··9 comments

The system they’re talking about appears to be the TRW RW-400, the programmer’s manual of which happens to be on Bitsavers[1].

There goes my evening.

[1] http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/trw/rw-400/AN-FSQ-27_...

The charset in Figure 16.9 is nice. Even has a nuclear cloud icon.

Thank you!!

This video is so artfully done, it not only teaches distributed computing in layman's terms but also inspires to check out TRW's offering.

Came across this video many years ago I think on Reddit while also digging into Hadoop. Continuing to talk a lot about distributed computing lately with coworkers made me remember it. Thanks to the other comments for finding the manual I've been skimming that on and off all evening.

It's an extraordinary video, amazingly ahead of its time both about distributed computing and just as a film. Even the use of the word "guys" is like a bit of the future back-propagated.

It feels like an edutainment video essay on YouTube that was made today.

Uo! I want this kind of videos in 2020, so well explained!

You're in for a treat, just check out the other videos on that channel.

Jeff Quitney used to be on YouTube before they kicked him off due to (what appear to be) false copyright claims against his videos. He has slowly been moving them over to Vimeo for the last several months.

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