The Computer Chronicles (1983 – 2002) | Hacker News Reader

The Computer Chronicles (1983 – 2002)

archive.org

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My lockdown project has been organizing these episodes. The full resolution versions are in an annoying format (interlaced MPEG-2), there's a bunch of duplicates caused by some of the recordings being from repeated episodes, and many of them are incorrectly tagged.

I'm actually pretty much finished now, I just need to re-upload the new versions back to the archive.

Wow, that's an amazing effort! What a generous thing to devote your time to - I'll look forward to the results.

I'm not sure how you're planning to upload them back to the archive, but be aware that the command line tools[1] sometimes have issues with uploading larger files. I've found that the command-line tools are more reliable (supporting more retries by default) than the direct Python API.

Also, by default, archive.org will "derive" the uploaded video into a variety of different formats (this is normally a good thing, but I'm mentioning it since you might have already re-encoded them yourself and may want to avoid the system from "messing" with them). You can turn off derivation with a command line flag "--no-derive" to the "ia upload" tool (or a "queue_derive=False" parameter to internetarchive.upload() if using the Python API).

(source: I'm currently uploading thousands of local government videos, many of them 3+ hours long, to archive.org. With this many videos, I have scripts checking the hashes of uploaded videos to make sure the process worked before deleting any source files on my machine.)

[1] https://archive.org/services/docs/api/internetarchive/

My current plan is to upload each season as a single item, rather than individual episodes.

Would you be able to create a torrent magnet link? I'd love to get a copy for myself

In the days before the Internet, a new episode of Computer Chronicles was a big deal to a young me. It was the only source of personal computing news at the time besides going to the library once a month to read the new magazines.

Fun moment in retrospect: Someone from Blizzard demoed a preview of Diablo on the show. In the live demo, the first monster he kills drops a Book of Identify (permanent ability). Before the game shipped, they removed that item and made buying and carrying Scrolls of Identify (consumable) into a rather annoying gameplay mechanic.

Before the web?

Before you could be on it 24/7.

TCC is so good. The late Gary Kildall—CP∕M creator and DRI founder—was a frequent co-host! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

He was the Bill Gates we needed.

I haven't clicked the link, but some are on YT too, featuring the coolest guy in the industry : Gary Kindall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

This presentation by Stewart Cheifet from the 2018 Tandy Assembly (TRS-80 enthusiasts conference) included some interesting information about the genesis and life of the Computer Chronicles TV show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIf6leAPaEM

(He states that there's a connection between his trying to get funding for the show and a famous TV ad.)

Love the story about his first unpleasant experience with a certain tech personality, "one of many".

The HyperCard episode was fun to watch https://archive.org/details/CC501_hypercard

I remember watching the 1980s episodes as a kid. Didn't understand a thing past the Commodores and Ataris and Apple ][s, but I loved it. It was a whole new world.

Now I watch them again and I actually understand (and actually have many of these computers in my collection), but I still have that same sense of marvel at looking at a new world unfolding. The microcomputer revolution was something to behold and this show captured it.

The Computer Bowl episodes were fun too. East vs West, back when Silicon Valley hadn't dominated the industry completely. The first couple of Computer Bowls had pretty big industry leaders participating.

And FYI, Stewart Cheifet also hosted a spinoff show called NetCafe which is historically interesting in its own right. Some episodes you can also find on archive.org and youtube.

Loved this show as a kid. The annoying thing about now is, because of the format of the show, they only get to spend a couple minutes on each demo. I would be fine watching a whole half hour of the latest piece of hardware or newest application.

One great thing about the show was that it covered more than Windows and DOS, the most exciting episodes to me were the ones that showed UNIX workstations

Lots of people forget that until quite recently computing was an extremely diverse environment. Everything from home computing to mainframes had dozens of manufacturers, mostly incompatible not only with each other, but even between their own computers! Dozens of OSs, CPU architectures, graphics, and so on were everywhere.

Today's computing is pretty boring by comparison. It used to take work to keep up to date with what was going on just in consumer PCs, it seemed like an entirely new system architecture was being announced every few months. In the 80s and early 90s, specialized work for various business cases often even required entirely custom hardware. The average computer just wasn't versatile enough to cover all of the use-cases.

CC, by trying to cover a broad swatch of computing, inevitably spent lots of time in these interesting areas, even if they seem kind of niche these days.

Really fascinating is that their interview and showcase desk often features "titans" of industry like Jack Tramiel demoing something alongside a small company's disheveled software engineer. Even more interesting is how the industry has completely transformed such that the ratio of suited sales guys that used to be everywhere in the public face of computing like CC are mostly gone, and replaced by those same engineers.

Much as my son happily got up early before school to watch Pokemon, I happily got up early before work to catch The Computer Chronicles.

Episode 3 is a Classic. 17 year-old Will Harvey showing his summer coding project, Music Construction Set from EA.

On the very first episode Herb Lechner, from SRI, mentions the feeling of nostalgia brought by visiting the Computer Museum (before it moved from Boston and became the Computer History Museum).

It's fun to see the interest in retrocomputing dates back to the early 80's.

Great interview with Stewart Cheifet from a few years ago.

https://youtu.be/mBvT3B3sB_U

"total size of requested files (105 GB) is too large for zip-on-the-fly"

Bummer, I was going to download and watch offline using a USB in my TV.

https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive

https://archive.org/services/docs/api/internetarchive/

The formats might be kinda funky for your TV. You might want to run `youtube-dl -f18` against a YouTube playlist

I would have loved this show as a kid. Was this local to the bay area or was it picked up by other PBS stations?

It was definitely in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. So, probably picked up by most of the PBS's.

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