My favorite 1980's Canadian TV show: Bits and Bytes | Hacker News Reader

My favorite 1980's Canadian TV show: Bits and Bytes

omarshehata.substack.com

Shocking to see Luba Goy presenting a serious show about computers! I think most Canadians know her as a sketch comedian from her work in the Royal Canadian Air Farce.

https://youtu.be/eRDTCE7DEMY

I went to a filming as a kid. They’re all naturally hilarious, but especially Goy and Morgan.

Also here’s my favourite. The look on Morgan’s face when he delivers the punch line of the sketch is one of such supreme satisfaction.

https://youtu.be/67-GeNYShbc?si=SlvGmFnZ9akGiD7M

An amazing skit.

Happens to be that Abbott and Fergusen are alumni of my high school (where they met).

small world - me too!

I thought this was a parody at first for that reason, haha

Even back when this TV show came out, Luba Goy (and Billy Van) were known for their comedy. I kept waiting for the jokes... I expected to be laughing my head off. Instead, we get calm, serious Luba Goy and Billy Van teaching us about microcomputers.

It's like Robin Williams teaching a subject with a straight face... You want the comedy to flow.

It’s like a clown delivering a heart felt speech at a birthday party.

In the UK we had The Computer Programme [1] (with Kraftwerk - Computer Love as its theme) and Making the Most of the Micro [2]

[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOtimvwAoYtnCtLiLspq_Gnng...

[2] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOtimvwAoYtlWZdX-MgnHrr-G...

You may already realize this, but the backing track and production of the "Bits and Bytes" theme slavishly borrow from the song "Neon Lights" by Kraftwerk.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rbARvOyyjUI

I'd love to know who animated that intro. Strongly reminds me of the intro to Bananaman, or Cosgrove Hall's work on eg Jamie and the Magic Torch.

There were also several others, including some live shows, all of which can be found on the BBC's Computer Literacy Project Archive: https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/

During one of the live shows, demonstrating e-mail, the e-mail account was hacked, probably the first hack captured on TV: https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ak7w5/as-seen-on-tv-when-ha...

I loved this show. I taught me the difference between a compiler and an interpreter a decade before the web even existed, when our school had one commodore PET. Core memory: I was in 7th grade and I got teased mercilessly for mentioning it during science class once. Ironically, the kid who teased me the most went on to become a founder of a very successful internet company in the late 90's and then retired in his early 30's and just flies around the world teaching people to surf. Grrr...

For me it was Dotto's Data Cafe (1990s Canadian TV show):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1wEOoCDNmg

Me too!

He has his own youtube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/@dottotech

Fantastic show for sure.

3000 views per video. 480p video quality. A travesty!

This guy is an expert technology communicator for a non-tech crowd, even today.

Youtube killed the TVO star.

There was also a French Canadian version of this show called "Octo-puce".

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octo-puce

That's an awesome name. ("Puce" is French for "Computer Chip" in this context, "Octo" as in Octet).

Jim Butterfield Commodore 64

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J9WnHuGjZ38

I have an ancient memory of this show wherein Billy says "Word processing? That sounds like FOOD processing!" I have not yet been able to refind this moment, even going through the YouTube archives.

But going through those videos made me wistful. It was like Mr. Wizard (of whom I was also a fan back then): concise, friendly, encyclopedic explanations of both how to do things with the computers of the day, and of how the machines actually worked. For example, explaining the CPU as a little filing clerk inside the machine who receives instructions on what to do with the numbers stored in the vast array of numbered filing cabinets (i.e., the RAM). The videos interposing the bits with Luba and Billy also had a lovely early-80s "analog aesthetic", akin to Sesame Street.

This show was aired in Brazil while I was growing up. Dubbed, as it was common in TV back then. IIRC, it aired in my state’s educational channel.

It was weird to see computers we didn’t have access to (most Brasilian ones were TRS, Sinclair, and Apple II compatibles. No PET and no PCs just yet. And no Xerox 820 either.

I met Luba Goy at a comedy show many years ago. I also knew Billy Van, when Billy Van was moving to California in the 70's from Toronto, he gave me his German Shepard called Lobo. Kind of weird to see a post with those 2 people....

For most people here I imagine Computer Chronicles is already known. It’s on YouTube and on the Internet Archive, and one of the presenters is the guy who was the Bill Gates we needed, not the one we deserved.

Jim Butterfield was a consultant on this video series.

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

I learned to program my C64 in assembly language thanks to Jim!

In Germany: WDR Computerclub https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDR_Computerclub

And they (well, one of them) are still active https://www.youtube.com/@computerclubzwei

Yes that is cool. I think the other guy is already dead

Yes unfortunately, but they unfortunately even split before the YouTube channel [1]

Here is an translated interview with Wolfgang Back [2] about the early days.

[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Back

[2] https://sceneworld.org/blog/2019/07/23/video-interview-with-...

Yes, grew up with them too. The future was here, lol. Smart Home from the beginning of the 90s: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mIvE8XwJ0H0

Oh this one is cool. Thanks

CBC also had a wonderful show call ZeD -- early 2000s, it was user generated content before anyone knew what that was. Short films, music by unknown artists, oddball animation.

They had an 'interactive website' years before YouTube existed, and the format intentionally had a lot of internet crossover. They clearly had no idea what they were doing half the time, and it was wonderful.

Whenever people reminisce about the early internet, I think of this show as a pioneer in 'new media'.

> Richard Feynman on explaining technical matters to the average person

Richard Feynman lecture on computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

Every time I’ve watched that video I wonder what it would have been like to be in the audience and correct Feynman that 8x7 != 16.

But, Feynman also tells this interviewer that he can't really explain how magnetic attraction and repulsion work. "I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

I think this is a really important part of simplified explanations. You can get pretty far explaining things to people based on the questions that come to them naturally, but eventually you’ll hit a point where understanding requires asking a very long series of the right questions. At these points you have to be willing to say “to go further in this direction, we have to cover several dozen hours of background material” rather than trying to find an immediate practical connection that doesn’t exist.

That clip was part of a longer interview with Feynman and he did a lot of those. If he were that concerned about oversimplifying or getting into circular arguments (magnets, rubber bands, elasticity, back to electromagnetism) I think he would not have done them in the first place.

I am a great admirer of Feynman and overall appreciate what he has done to explain physics and the scientific approach to the public. In this case, I wonder why he agreed to the interview at all.

Robert Frost addressed some of this is "Education by Poetry." I don't pretend to grok all of his talk but he talks about how we use metaphor to explain and understand but that metaphor has its limitations [1].

"Another metaphor that has interested us in our time and has done all our thinking for us is the metaphor of evolution. Never mind going into the Latin word. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of the growing plant or of the growing thing. And somebody very brilliantly, quite a while ago, said that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a growing thing. That is all. I know the metaphor will break down at some point, but it has not failed everywhere."

[1] https://www.poetrysoup.com/poetry/resources/documents/educat...

Let’s not forget Mighty Machines.

I watched all of Mighty Machines with my kid recently and learned so much!

where can you watch them?

There are some available on YouTube.

One of the first shows that we let our kid watch. The trucks have voices (sort of of) but mostly it’s just a narrator describing what machines do while they calmly do machine stuff.

thank you. I found it on YouTube

My oldest kid loved Mighty Machines so much when he was little.

I knew the guy that did the animation for mighty machines. The voices of all the characters in the first two seasons were drawn from his friends in bluegrass bands.

There is still Spark on CBC radio https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark about "technology and culture".

wish i could watch YTV again online like netflix

all my old favorite shows: little hamster show, wishbone, whatamess, dragonball z , gunda wing, uh-oh (my friend was a contestant), video arcade top 10

and the most iconic of all: The Zone

https://www.stacktv.ca/ Has YTV (probably not older shows though) and Stack is a bit pricey in my opinion.

The YTV set is all lame now though

Not to mention the Amazing Adrenalini Brothers

I think it may be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bitsandbytestvo

I'm going to use a few of those videos next time I teach computer programming.

I'd love to watch all of them. Does anyone have a torrent?

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@bitsandbytestvo

http://www.davidstringer.ca/index.htm Is worth a mention too

This was when Canada was creating value. Not it is a birthing ground for talent who need to go to the US to achieve their potential.

Oh my god, thanks for the memories! I grew up watching this, just across the border in Buffalo!

If SCTV is not on this list then I have nothing further to discuss. Good day, Gentlemen.

>And yet, they do NOT talk down to their audience. They do not dumb things down.

Reminded me of an old NBC interview with Frank Herbert that ended up in my Youtube feed a few days ago. (https://youtu.be/26GPaMoeiu4) It's pretty wild just how different the tone, language and content is to what you expect to see on big platforms or channels nowadays.

I watched this when I was a kid in the 80s in Canada. It was super interesting and made me want to learn how to program. Unfortunately my parents weren’t rich enough to afford a computer so I never got into computers until I graduated from college, but here I am now in my 50s and in Silicon Valley as a full fledged programmer.

History Bites was another good one.

As part of the generation who grew up along with computers (that is to say that computers were also growing up) I am concerned that this level of understanding is no longer common. What happens when not enough people remember how the foundations of our towers of abstraction work?

I've been shopping for a C=64 for my kid.

I would recommend the TheC64 Maxi. It’s a replica, but very faithful, and can be setup to start as a C64 would (disk and tape are emulated from USB sticks, but that’s a minor compromise).

The same thing that happens with every level of technology that eventually becomes ubiquitous enough to be considered a household appliance. How many people understand the internal workings of a combustion engine, how a telephone works, or how a microwave heats up their food?

Here's what happens, society chugs along just fine until a catastrophic event like an EMP which effectively drops them back into the Stone Age, except even worse because many people have jobs with skill sets that don't really serve a purpose outside of the modern capitalistic economy.

Not many understand but they should try. It is very fulfilling to build an engine (start with an electric motor; it’s trivial but still fulfilling). It is very fulfilling to build a computer out of basic logic gates. Or a radio out of some crap that’s definitely laying around in your house.

You are missing out not doing that; things seem like magic until you do them. Sure building a processor yourself won’t have all the branch prediction and etc as your intel/m* has, but at least you understand how it could work. Same for gpus ; you won’t be making anything close to what the state of the art is, but you’ll understand how it gets there.

I have a few 100 (I had over a 1000) original c64s I give away to kids; one of them managed to solder in more memory and make a networking card from a pi zero. It’s fun; everything is easy fixable and it Just Works. After 40 years.

One could argue it was never all that common, except for a period where the “lower level” was all that was available. Though I have seen (possibly anecdotal) interest in some microcontroller hobbying with younger geeks, including ESP32 stuff.

But this way of thinking can also be applied to other industries. What ends up happening is that specialization forms. There are still (young even) people that get into low level languages, including assembler when optimizations require it (though compilers just keep getting better).

There’s also the inevitable back and forth between abstraction, then a reversal to simplify and remove layers. You had low level (binary/assembler) higher (C), higher (java JRE, python/perl/JS and other interpreted languages) and now there’s interest in Rust, which is a bit of a modern twist on lower level programming.

You see this back and forth elsewhere. Computing work used to be done on the server side (mainframes), then distributed out to individual computers, and then back to the cloud, and next (LLMs maybe)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com