1979: Will WORD PROCESSORS start a HOME WORKING revolution? | Past Predictions | BBC Archive

Luke Casey examines the impact of the microprocessor in the workplace. Already, the adoption of word processors and text editing software in offices has been shown to provide massive efficiency boosts. Could sophisticated networking systems - using existing telephone wires to allow microprocessors to communicate with one another - spell the end of office work altogether, enabling employees to work effectively from home?
There is some remarkably prophetic stuff in this report.
This clip is from Nationwide, originally broadcast 11 December, 1979.
00:00 The inefficient office
01:14 What is a word processor?
02:44 Floppy disks
03:15 Wordplex system in Bradford Council
04:24 Home working with networked word processors
07:05 Micropad
07:54 Author Cy Enfield's Microwriter
09:29 The end of the Industrial Revolution?
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[@VicodinElmo]

The fact that young couples could just choose a house and come to the council for a mortgage is the most surprising thing to me!

[@vanrutgar6536]

And how polite staff are In fact how everyone talks in the video Now it's gutteral Society is degrading

[@mel816]

Not from the UK myself, but I wonder if the council actually funded the mortgage or were they just a mortgage broker?

[@unnamedchannel1237]

@@vanrutgar6536 you think they may have been polite because they new the camera was on them ?

[@DavidPaulMorgan]

when I started at a local council - we used to manage the MIRAS mortgage system. Mortgage Interest Relief at Source - yes, council mortgages.

[@davidkmatthews]

@@DavidPaulMorgan That's intriguing! Do you mean for people to purchase their council house under the "Right To Buy" scheme? If so, I was under the impression that the ability do so came into effect in late 1980, yet this film is apparently from the year before....?

[@TweedSuit]

1979: Will WORD PROCESSORS start a HOME WORKING revolution? 2020: No. But a global pandemic will. 2023: Back in the office again…

[@twisterwiper]

Haha, true 😄

[@csharp3884]

Yup, in 1979, they are 40 years too early. Sad to think people spent their whole careers doing work in an office when they could have been doing it at home

[@dcarbs2979]

It's the technology that allowed it to happen. If it was all still manual, work would grind to a halt.

[@csharp3884]

@DnB and Psy Production I would argue it’s less motivating to work in the office BECAUSE of so many people to interact with. Too many opportunities for side conversation and spontaneity to ruin work flow. Sometimes you just want to get your work done and not be involved with office politics

[@rockets4kids]

My first thought reading the title when it popped up in my feed.

[@tommypyatt4062]

I aspire to one day have a well equipped kitchen, two children, and a bubble memory terminal.

[@philip-at-tube]

lol

[@Hollywood041]

I cannot even properly imagine a well-equipped kitchen.

[@fionamessenger7660]

After all, it's the best thing that 's happened since The Pill. Please.

[@mirzaahmed6589]

Currently I only have a partially equipped kitchen.

[@AntGeezer]

I love how he had to write a bit of code to change one word. Just wonderful.

[@therealcaldini]

Still an extremely efficient way to do things. Tools such as sed and awk on Unix systems can be very powerful if you know how to use them. I still use Vi when I can and its command to replace a word is very similar.

[@tralphstreet]

@@therealcaldini Please tell me you're not actually using vi, and are instead using something more modern, like vim or neovim.

[@therealcaldini]

@@tralphstreet To be fair, I think on most modern systems vi is an alias of vim isn’t it?

[@tralphstreet]

@@therealcaldini Yes.

[@DavidPaulMorgan]

@@therealcaldini they reminded me of the old visicalc commands and also the vi editor!

[@FoxDren]

People where successfully working from home even back then yet managers still refuse to accept it

[@Maximustard]

If I’m paying someone’s wages, they would need to work, at work

[@scottishwildcat]

@@Maximustard Then you're missing out on a lot of hard-working, unstressed, self-motivated people, and paying a lot of unnecessary office rent and utility bills. Your choice.

[@meh3247]

@@Maximustard One cursory glance at your profile page here reveals you to be a follower of these channels: GBNews, Trump, PragerU, The Right Media, Mr Reagan, Ben Shapiro, WokeMedia, RedPill comedy, and a whole host of football accounts. Surmising from this, I think everyone whose IQ is greater than Pi, can ignore you on the grounds that you're a right wing troll just trying to gain attention in a youtube comment thread because the overwhelming majority of real life humans in your immediate vicinity quite rightly ignore you and your absurd views. Which is what I'm going to do now, safe in the knowledge that you're not an employer of anyone - you lack the ability to employ critical thinking. Cheerio, lonely boy.

[@shaunsteele8244]

@@Maximustard why does it matter what their physical location is, if they're doing the work and getting the job done?

[@wcg66]

Management hasn’t evolved since the start of the industrial revolution.

[@edum.6353]

the fact this is from 1979 is mindblowing, everything so precise and on point

[@animatewithdermot]

It's striking alright. Often these old pieces are incredibly silly, but this one is eerie.

[@brucemanly]

Apart from that micro typewriter. It looks horrible.

[@alanpods______8260]

"It's the biggest aid to totalitarianism you could ever come across, if you think about it... On the other hand its the greatest boon to decentralization and people fulfilling themselves" Wow! How perfectly predicted.

[@twitchygiraffe4636]

If you count people shaming others for what they think on facebook totalitarianism, then well predicted mate!!!!

[@TaylerKnox]

That’s harsh.

[@TaylerKnox]

@Saint Ratus thanks.

[@eliteneo_gta7035]

looking at you, Metaverse.... 😏

[@mastergoogoo5854]

One of the rare occasions the bbc was telling the truth. No doubt if someone said something like that today if would be labelled disinformation, misinformation or malinformation. The person saying it would be labelled as either: extreme right, conspiracy theorist, climate change denier, Russian spy, domestic terrorist or/ and anti vaxxer today. They would also be arrested by the thought police and brought to the ministry of love. Orwell would be turning in his grave. I certainly do not consent to this evil future the satanic elites have planned for us.

[@DeusExAstra]

This video is so prophetic, it's remarkable. It's like they were getting ready for 2020 way back then and didnt realize it.

[@moogfooger]

ya, they realizedit alright

[@SwazerSwazers]

Pretty impressive considering this was in the late 70s & they were already talking about voice recognition tech & working from home remotely. The dude talking about consoles in the home was on the money for sure & his comments on getting it wrong & tyranny were scaringly accurate. I was born in 72. As kids, we fantasised about the kind of tech that's now taken for granted.

[@Dendroapsis]

He even seemed to predict the internet at 7:06

[@a9udn9u]

I love the color tone of videos from 60s and 70s.

[@engineeredlifeform]

I had a massive argument with my Technology teacher in 1982 or '83. I'd said I was interested in being a computer programmer, he said 'no point, all the computer programs we'll ever need will have been written within five years'. I'd argued that computers would become ubiquitous, as they were getting smaller and cheaper, he said we just wouldn't need them that much. The cellphone in my pocket is more powerful and has more storage than the room full of computers I looked after around 1990,....

[@TheBroz]

I remember an IT teacher of mine in the mid 90s who was convinced that software would write itself by the time I was grown up.

[@AD-kv9kj]

Mere centuries ago everyone was saying slavery could never be stopped and was just "human nature". Basically, people haven't a clue what they're talking about but love to feel like they do and anything can change radically if we care enough to make it happen.

[@meh3247]

I took a different approach, by demonstrating to the Teachers that I knew more than they did at the time. My "work experience" was writing computer aided electronic circuitry design software for the local college. I was exploited by the clueless.

[@SimirJohnson]

Those who can, do. Those who cant, teach.

[@xr6lad]

@@SimirJohnson I’m assuming your surgeon became proficient by just picking up that scalpel and practising on everyone? I hope you certainly fly no planes: be difficult finding your pilot without having being taught to fly.

[@Nightweaver1]

This was made the year I was born. It's amazing to see just how far computing has come in the last 43 years, from cumbersome central hard disks and awkward, slow word processors to supercomputers you hold in your hand and connection speeds so fast you can download the entire Library of Congress in a few seconds.

[@StefanMilner]

I'm 21 and these archives are so fascinating, the world was such a different place back then, this report portrays so well how revolutionary being able to go back and edit text you've typed was, even typing this comment I've made plenty of typos.

[@leandrotami]

I am really, really amazed at how current and foreshadowing this turned out to be. Programming remotely from home... in the 70s! The analysis of a society where remote work slowly becomes more and more common... I'm astonished

[@Hollywood041]

Have you ever seen this show, Star Trek? It's trippy man. They were all like "let's imagine what the future could look like given our understanding of technology today." And then there was this other one TNG, that went beyond tech and said "you know, our society would probably change too. I wonder what that will be given our current arc of progress." Wild.

[@brucemanly]

​@@Hollywood041TOS had society chances too

[@davidkmatthews]

Brilliant bit of history! The "F International" company referred to actually started up in the early 1960s, employing mostly female programmers working from home. They built up a strong worldwide reputation for excellence. I seem to recall that using a telephone in 1979 cost around four pence per minute (16 pence in today's money), so I imagine they'd have to use the dial-in connection sparingly in order to avoid racking up hefty bills with Buzby!

[@caimin15221522]

For those interested: F International was a British freelance software and systems services company, founded as Freelance Programmers in England in 1962, by Dame Stephanie Shirley; she was involved in the company until she retired in 1993. The company was renamed in 1974 to F International. In 1988 the company was renamed again, to The FI Group, and later as Xansa plc. Xansa plc was acquired by the French company now known as Sopra Steria in 2007. From Wikipedia en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_International

[@dieseldragon6756]

As soon as I saw the reference to uploading work by modem, the phone bills were the first thing that came to mind! They were expensive enough in the late 80s (As an 8 year old who’d just learned his best friends number quickly found out!) so the notion of using a modem in the late 70s with bit rates in the 10s/sec sounds pretty darn pricey! 😳 With that - And my love of cycling in mind - I think it more likely I’d have printed off or saved the work to tape at home and then run it into the office. With my documents often exceeding the 50KB mark, using SneakerNet would be both quicker, and cheaper! 😇

[@mancerrss]

They we're all WFH and Freelancing, even before everybody and they mommas are working from home. I wonder what happened to this Freelancing company that is way way way ahead of it's time.

[@GeeEee75]

Women of the 1960s and 70s were the equivalent of offshore workers today. They could legally be paid less than a man for the same work.

[@alanjrobertson]

About halfway through they actually make some pretty good predictions about working from home and the Internet! The alternative keyboard not so much...

[@RagHelen]

Somehow the information that you can correct typos easily before sending the text out was lost somewhere in the past 43 years.

[@animatewithdermot]

Your right its infruiating isn't it.

[@effess8698]

5:05 "Just look at the French..." presumably he's referring to Minitel, a precursor to the world wide web, which was being rolled out around the time of this programme, and amazingly survived until 2012

[@WalterVermeir]

I have used a Minitel a while in early 2000's in Belgium. There where used by deaf people to make contact. I was acting as a gateway for deaf people to make calls to hearing people and to translate between them. That service still exist but is webbased now. Minitel service was a long time available alongside the webchat option but was eventually terminated because nobody used it anymore. And hardly anyone remembered how it worked at the end.

[@dieseldragon6756]

The vast difference in uptake between Frances Minitel and the UKs Prestel systems is an excellent demonstration of the pros/cons of public and private sector implementation of new technology. Minitel was provided free to anybody with telephone service, whilst British subscribers wanting Prestel had to fork out about £450 (About £2,800 in 2022 money) in equipment alone, and that doesn’t even cover the additional subscriptions to access Prestel, and additional charges that could accidentally be incurred whilst browsing! (Prestel supported a „Chargeable page” feature). With this in mind, it’s probably not surprising that Minitel lasted thirty years, whilst Prestel - Though allegedly more durable and versatile than the former - Barely lasted thirty *months*! 🇬🇧💸🙃

[@GeertDelmulle]

Yes indeed.

[@davidrenton]

@@dieseldragon6756 that is a disadvantage in it's self , having a 30 year system from the 80's onwards would be incredibly antiquated

[@Vassilika1]

4:57 thumbs up for the person who installed the plate, all screw heads in the same direction.... Thank you, I love it!

[@MrAsBBB]

Great video and loved the kitchen shot. Takes me back to my childhood. I was a child of the 70s

[@CaptainX2012]

I love that you are uploading this old stuff, keep up the good work!

[@michaelt8682]

i mean its the bbc archive. what else is it going to do?

[@Hollywood041]

@@michaelt8682 Well, they could not upload the archive... and just keep it in a basement storage for reference until somebody comes to requisition a specific episode on the correct form, in triplicate.

[@ilanpretz]

I do love to see the childhood of our technology through the eyes of our grandparents 😍😍😍🤗

[@smithmr1]

Love that this was so on point and an accurate reflection of life today.

[@mindblast3901]

Life today Sucks

[@TinLeadHammer]

As boring as back then, typing on a screen instead of real keyboard.

[@user-jt5vm3mi1w]

no it isn't

[@user-jt5vm3mi1w]

@@mindblast3901 how does it?

[@PoshLifeforME]

I wish I could go back to 1979 with all the IT knowledge I have accumulated from the mid 80's. Ah fantasies. where would I be without you.

[@eaaeeeea]

Most big companies talked about digitalization for decades (all my life), but the pandemic forced everyone's hand. In the companies I've worked at during the pandemic, the switch to home office was relatively painless. Our financials showed that productivity stayed the same or increased. So not all bad this pandemic.

[@kay_red1156]

It took 41 years and a pandemic for upper management to understand.

[@ColtraneTaylor]

And they still have not understood. 50 years from now they can undo what little changes we are asking for, just as with Roe v Wade. Primitive bahstards.

[@fuehrer_tb5597]

Truee..

[@jeanbonnefoy1377]

Fascinating! Too bad the MicroWriter didn't really caught, though. However, I keep dear memories of my first Olivetti "word processor" in 1978 and I still keep several boxes of 10 5"1/4 floppy disks... each needed to contain just one of my books - and not the longest ones! Living then in Paris, I enjoyed having a Minitel terminal by my desk. Used not only as a white and yellow pages phone books on line but for checking the weather forecast, reading the news, send and receive messages or book train tickets...

[@PaulRuane]

You can still get chorded keyboards: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard

[@DavidPaulMorgan]

I remember the Microwriter (never had one) and the French Minitel - the internet without the internet I suppose. I suppose in UK we did really take to the teletext services - especially for news, weather and the Oracle/Teletext holiday pages. Prestel never really caught on - I used it once for my first 'real' job in '84 to post product pricing for the (remote) London office.

[@acmenipponair]

The microwriter was just a stupid idea of a person tired of a typewriter. Nowadays you can type faster when you are good trained on a computer keyboard than even with a typewriter, as you don't have to care for spelling errors, as you can simply delete them. You often can achieve up to 400 characters a minute when you are well trained - even professional typists in the 1970s weren't able to type so fast without much mistakes.

[@mancerrss]

I think Microwriter eventually evolved into stenographer tho, which are still being used in courtooms. The ultimate opponent of technology aside from mass adoption is it's user friendlyness. And the way this system works, as fast as it seems is still too complex for a normal human to learn. You'll need to practice and think first before you type. It's unnatural

[@IkarusKommt]

@@mancerrss Such keyboards were invented several times since late-30s.

[@TheStevenWhiting]

3:13 Different type of minidisk :) and I never knew Verbatim had been around that long.

[@westminsterwatcher5152]

Bloody love this channel!

[@K.F-R]

How a smart, prescient optimist sees the future of the Internet in 1979: 10:20

[@brianm2881]

We asked for it, though. We wanted these connected devices. It just so happened that as these devices gave us an ability to reach out, it gave others an ability reach in. If this trend continues, it could end up being that one of the great personal commodities of the future is true privacy.

[@Jimyjames73]

W😮W - Floppy discs - I remember those days!!! Also early days of the "Super Information High-way" - I.e. the internet!!! 😉🚂🚂🚂

[@Aerojet01]

I learnt how to touch type on an electronic typewriter at college. In those days, you had an idea where computers were heading. In one lesson, I witnessed a BBC micro connected to a telephone and it was sending/receiving Ceefax messages. I remember being blown away by it.

[@deadstoned]

Totally amazing. I really love BBC ARCHIVE. Thanks for sharing.

[@phild8192]

They predicted voice recognition! We don’t even really think about that these days, but it’s only been with us for about a decade.

[@TinLeadHammer]

The frame selected for the thumbnail is the best one in the whole video: very clean and futuristic. I commend the person who chose that image and modified it, using a suitable retro-futuristic background, very stylish.

[@Payne2view]

The MicroWriter was still trying to gain popularity when I did my Computer Studies diploma in 1988. I'm glad I learned to type instead.

[@truth-12345.]

BBC Archive is like a time capsule for this old tech short documentary videos.

[@TheCatBilbo]

In a few years from this, I'm going to own my first computer: a Sinclair ZX81. That alone is an amazing revolution - an 11-year old with a home computer! Unthinkable not many years before. The presenter is Luke Casey, who only died in November 2022 at 80. Originally from Ireland he came to the UK at 14. Here, he is a mere 37-years old!

[@brucemanly]

What I always remember about the zx81 is Kryten telling me that starbug somehow crashes more often 😂

[@MrMann0123]

That is brilliant.

[@connclissmann6514]

By 1979, on our firm we were already using WordStar (with the optional MergeStar and SpellStar).

[@kebman]

Marvellous! I saw the digital typewriters emerge in the 80's, meaning typewriters that had a little LCD display where you could pre-type the text and edit it, before printing it out on the page. The typewriter wouldn't _print_ it per se, but actually type it in machine-gun fashion, rakka-takka-takka on the paper. It was magical technology!

[@mainstay.]

I remember in 1985, a friend had a typewriting business ( mainly typing students theses) another mutual friend worked for Xerox and 'gave' her one of these digital typewriters, as you say small, 80 character screen. I remember thinking ( as a 'hands on ' joiner) this is great for people that work in an office, but this technology will never help me in my work. How wrong I was!

[@CaiAllinx]

Haha that's so brilliant that you could put the phone against the printer to transfer the data!

[@jsjxyz]

Wow, good material for teaching, thanks

[@hdufort]

With decentralized work we should eventually start to see the big central cities losing office space, perhaps entire companies, the highways and major access roads will see a reduction in traffic jams. Smaller "satellite" towns, not exactly suburbs, just far enough, will be favored. The financial and business districts once needed to be packed together for three main reasons. They needed eyes on port activities. They needed to be close to the stock exchange. They needed to be close to each other to exchange communications and organize meetings. None of this matters anymore.

[@DaveFlash]

'in the future inevitably we'll all be part of a worldwide information society' yes, it's called the internet or World Wide Web, and here's me watching this thing on a little thing called KZbin, short for 'your own telly'.

[@dieseldragon6756]

Before this service came into existence, I’d always thought a „U Tube” was the prefabricated tunnels used to build Metro lines in many German cities… 🚇🇩🇪😇

[@merion297]

Fascinating period documents these are. 😊 Thank you for sharing it the world. We have a time machine now, sort of.

[@nothereforit.605]

It’s funny how all the machines and programs became obsolete so quickly because of how fast progress was made. I wonder if a country or even an office ended up losing ungodly amounts of money by jumping to quickly on one breakthrough. Then just as soon as they finished upgrading their infrastructure a second faster one came onto the market.

[@ojbeez5260]

Still happening...always will. Upgrade cycles in some companies are as short as every 6 months. Windows bloody updates are every month or so.

[@MD-fu6ly]

A lot of places ended up using the legacy machinery for 10-20 years

[@oldtwinsna8347]

It depends on the industry. For a real viable business that could leverage technology, the benefits far, far, exceeded the expenses involved in such things. There were real competitive advantages back in those days where you lost contracts, customers, because you weren't keeping up.

[@Hokunin]

Japanese government still used floppy disks until just a few months ago. Even more ancient floppy disks are being used in Nuclear armament installations.

[@DesignFIaw]

@@Hokunin I hear the undertone there, and it's a common criticism (fear, even) of certain government operations. But not just them, COBOL is still widely used by most financial institutions and the global digital payment infrastructure as the core of their programming - a programming language designed more than 60 years ago. Often people associate old technology and early computing solutions with vulnerability and commonplace system failures. However, this isn't that simple. Here is an experiment for you. Get your smartphone, start using some everyday apps you'd normally use: and count all the bugs you encounter. All the non-intuitive behaviour, all the visual and control issues, everything. You'll be surprised to find that the quality of programming is extremely poor, you've just got accustomed to it. In fact, it has been declining for the last 10-15 years, visibly - this is despite the ever increasing processing power/intelligence, automated and predictive programming aids and all the other ever expanded tools and knowledge at programmers' disposal. Turns out that modern programming is extremely complex, but noone can truly understand the complexity of even a medium sized software, they are only building on the surface (ie high level code and abstractions). Micro-kernels have shown as that short, consise, but ultimately better built software are more robust and reliable. You can get away with control/UI issues, connectivity loss and some visual problems in an app like facebook messenger. Would you be OK with those same issues if you were sitting at a nuclear missile's control panel? I'd much rather have floppy disks and room sized computers control nuclear silos than an interactive web-application made in JS. This is (partly) why many of the most vital computer sites (tax offices, military etc.) around the world often use "outdated" technology, and why the banking sector is still heavily reliant on it; we can see how new organizations with more novel computer systems are prone for vulnerabilities (NY dams, colonial pipeline, oil terminals in europe, even SWIFT).

[@jmaycock]

This is excellent

[@andreaofficer6709]

10:09 to the end of this video is so incredibly prophetic!

[@davetate1155]

It really is quite amazing how far technology has come in such a short space of time.

[@MiKeMiDNiTe-77]

How else loves seeing late 70s footage of interesting things

[@andrewdeans3686]

Who else . . . . ? For goodness sake ! ! ! !

[@jimmybrad156]

@@andrewdeans3686 For godness psyche*

[@TheUtuber999]

How else indeed, except through YT. 😁

[@halfbakedproductions7887]

Absolutely love it. I work in modern day technology and really wish I could have been back at the start where all of this was truly cutting edge and exciting. I work for a research organisation and our current near-retirement MD and a few other old timers were 'on the tools' back in 1987, but our roots go back to 1971. In both cases there are plenty of photos. It looks _so_ cool. Would love to be sat in some 'computer room' with 1970s beardy men, looking at tape reels and a 2MB hard drive that's the size of my washing machine. You'd never take your work home with you, there was no on-call, no emphasis on tinkering with a home lab in every moment of your spare time. Work life balance was better and I have it on good authority that programming was also easier simply because the target systems were more primitive. Sadly, I can honestly say that modern day tech and IT just isn't as groundbreaking or magical. Nothing's really 'new' - the programming languages and frameworks are all there, the hardware is all there, the concepts are all there, the big cloud providers are there - you're just building variations on a common theme and essentially using a Lego set. Write some code using a load of off-the-shelf libraries and it gets burped out onto a Linux server, oh yay.

[@John-uz2sz]

Interesting take on the future from 1979

[@Seminal_Ideas]

The BBC back then was polite and informative.

[@TheUtuber999]

Cut my word processing teeth using Bank Street Writer for the Commodore 64 back in 1985. 40-column editing wasn't much fun... but 80-column editing using Wordstar on a PC in 1988 was a game-changer.

[@henryviii6341]

Bradford City Council LEADING THE WORLD 🤡 words I never thought would hear.

[@Maximustard]

😂

[@Starfireaw11]

Probably still running that system from the 1970s today 🤣🤣

[@xxnoxx-xp5bl]

Didn't sound too great to around half the people who used to work there...

[@brendanbrendan9435]

And words they'll never hear again......

[@mel816]

​@@Starfireaw11 lots of long established companies (especially banks and insurance companies) still run on 1970s and 1980s mainframes, just hidden behind web/graphical displays

[@WalterVermeir]

Did knew the Minitel story but not the original economic concept for it. Phone books! - From Belgium. The very last paper phone books where issued just a couple of years ago here. - Great video. Also did not new that the first modern 'home working' was done in 1979. Remarkable

[@mel816]

France Telecom (now Orange) also made tons of money by allowing third parties to offer content like news and ticket booking services, of course in exchange for a percentage of the fees😉

[@bmc868]

1979 Office : 1000 people 2022 Office : 1 person.....

[@TheBroz]

God damn I love this youtube channel, such brilliant artefacts.

[@DanielsPolitics1]

I’ve had out the papers for my employer’s plans for emergency working (WW2 if the office was destroyed or inaccessible, and emergency 24/7 working). In WW2 the plan was for me to visit every day one of a series of reporting centres, and once the office opened they would telephone or send a letter to the centre to tell me to come to work. In the 60s I would have been telephoned (some colleagues would be called on a neighbours phone, not having a phone) and told to call my telephone tree or report directly, and alert the duty teleprinter operator by phone. We would then report to the office. Once there I would probably have just stared in confusion at the teleprinter, not daring to tear off and read the messages until the operator arrived. Of course nowadays I’d get a call from my boss, open my laptop, and just get on with it. It would have seemed marvellous to my predecessors. I think what seems most odd to me is the apparent helplessness of senior staff. It would have been assumed I was completely incapable of operating anything more complex than a rotary dial telephone. Even then, an operator would have been available to enable me to reach extensions, and possibly normal direct dial lines.

[@Yoctopory]

We definitely need that in our company!!

[@bartobruintjes7056]

I hope that this invention will come soon to our homes.

[@jea559]

It'll never catch on! 😁

[@JonnyInfinite]

That typing hand thing is a proper nonsense invention, I love it

[@Renovator26]

I love this series! Some things we got hilariously wrong - and then came Twitter!! John, Ontario, Canada

[@ojbeez5260]

Wow...can't wait!

[@pioneer1131]

its absolutely insane how much they got right here

[@alumycrick2911]

Grandad: Ah, the days when floppy disks were actually floppy. Son: They were floppy? I don't believe it! Grandson: What's a floppy disk?

[@halfbakedproductions7887]

I was born in 1987 and remember proper floppy disks. We had them for our BBC B Micro and my grandfather's ancient Amstrad. When I was at secondary school in the early-mid 2000s we all had our own 3-1/2" floppy disks given to us by the school to save our work on. Those RM computers couldn't handle USB and nobody had a memory stick at that point. Got my very first USB memory stick in September 2005. It cost £25 and had a life-changing capacity of 512MB. I think I still have it somewhere.

[@xiaokhat]

@@halfbakedproductions7887 I read your comment and thought we went to the same school, but I am in Asia so that would be quite impossible. Back in the early 2000s, we were given mini floppy disks to save our work on. But I never saw a floppy disk in real life.

[@abiola33]

@@halfbakedproductions7887 Reading your comment felt so relatable. I'm a 87 baby also!

[@KANIME]

8:13 man pulled out the Cherry MX Blues

[@zitzong]

Wow- Amazing technology

[@stevenirby5576]

These people were on the absolute bleeding edge of technology. How amazing.

[@hyperteleXii]

My neighbor asked me in 2020 if there was an easier way to copy a computer text document than creating a new file and typing it out again.

[@KBProduction]

Just how much thing have changed

[@hunter2442]

Fascinating technology!! Having actually lived through that age until now this hits hard for me that I am old! I wish they had such a video explaining how current technology is helpful!! The portable typewriter 7:55 is a nightmare in my opinion!

[@masteryoda394]

5:44 It's nice to see BASIC again 😎

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

1:40 Nice to see a SWTPC 6800 being shown off!

[@TheStevenWhiting]

3:55 back in the days when they sold mortgages. I believe some of those are still on file. Where I was, a local council, they had converted them over to modern systems so had to look back on an old system to see the mortgages from the 80s they'd sold.

[@DecentralEyes]

I’ve wanted to be a computer programmer working from home since 2003!

[@katbryce]

37,000 pages of A4 text in a single computer 🤯. We now have a 1.5TB micro-SD card, which can store about 1 billion pages of text.

[@dieseldragon6756]

But don’t forget that „Some capacity is used for formatting and other purposes, and is not available for user storage”. Add to that the problem of „glut” (Write the same document in Word 97 and Office 2020, and look at the file sizes!) and the raw capacity increase translates to a much lower increase in practical capacity in real terms! 💾💸😉 Case in point: In the 90s all of your work assignments would fit on two 3,5” floppies totalling 2,8MB capacity. Nowadays you’d be in BIG trouble if relying on any flash drive smaller than 32GB… 🙃

[@katbryce]

@@dieseldragon6756 True, but part of that is due to text being stored in unicode, which means if you want to include some Russian, or Chinese, or Emoji characters in your document, you can now do that without messing around with different fonts.

[@dieseldragon6756]

@@katbryce Aye, the change to Unicode (e.g. 16 bytes per character as opposed to 8) does effectively double the size of the user text, but this isn’t the main driver of glut. In my example above the extra data wouldn’t generally oblige a third disk be carried. 💾😇 The main driver of glut is the extra data that manufacturers are now storing in data files and elsewhere (Particularly in filesystem journals) compared to before. In Word 97 a single page of ASCII text might be about 11KB and record creation and edit dates, the registered user and company name. Nowadays Office 365 will create a 50KB+ file to store the same information (Of which only 19KB is due to Unicode) and potentially record information you don’t want being transmitted with the file, such as unique IDs corresponding to your computer system and/or operating system installation. 🔓

[@MrIrrepressible]

1:06 ahh the old bubble screen tv with the blsck border. Haven't seen one of them in yonks

[@martinh4982]

Wait a minute... you went to the council to get a mortgage?

[@waverider1674]

1979 - Home Working 2020 - till now Work from home.

[@ergosteur]

5:30 a mother and a computer programmer. In 1979.

[@straightpipediesel]

There were a lot more women in computing from the early days until the 80's. Computers required clerical work, specifically punching cards then running them through the computer. Women naturally did these jobs. They'd be ask to keypunch a program written by hand on paper. They might also be given a stack of cards and ask to compile and run the program. As the operators did this, they'd naturally learn about programming. They'd eventually be able to fix mistakes themselves and then eventually write and debug programs. The entry level clerical stuff all went away with the terminal and personal computer, and women left the computer industry.

[@katbryce]

Yes, that is one area where things have gone backwards, a lot. Most of the early stuff related to computers was invented by women. The computer software that put Neil Armstrong on the moon for example, that was written entirely by women.

[@jimmybrad156]

sounds like she's on the pill, too.

[@FredF78]

What programming language is she using? Basic?

[@protectwhatisours6895]

@@katbryce not most. Let’s stay realistic down here.

[@tasmanjones84]

prophetic

[@thetooginator153]

In 1979, it was pretty reasonable to assume that the internet wasn’t going to be available to the general public. Just a few years later, regular folks could get an internet account. In the late eighties, my mom predicted that everyone was going to be on the internet, and I thought that idea was silly. Oops!

[@markarca6360]

It eventually came true. Starting in 2020, WFH flourished because of the pandemic situation. Nowadays, when speaking of a word processor, everyone refers to Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer.

[@chrisnewman7281]

The home computering revolution as interesting as it is, is really dwarfed by the mobile computering revolution. The program could’ve gone a bit further and said here in my hand is a device not much bigger than a stack of cards, and with it, I have the power of access a library information in seconds from anywhere across the world. In fact, I can communicate with somebody in Beijing in an instant, with a few taps on this screen.

[@postergmail6202]

Can’t wait to get my text processor.

[@iggytse]

That text editor looks like VI on Unix. That was archaic. The Pico text editor was easier to use.

[@davidmizak4642]

You deliver excellent content to your audience. It's very interesting material. All of your effort put into creating this video is much appreciated. I'm truly grateful for your help!

[@WhatALoadOfTosca]

It's the BBC. The UK tax payer pays them for it ;)

[@izzatfauzimustafa6535]

Who would have thought word processing end up increasing piles of workloads that disrupt workers' need for relaxation at home many decades later?

[@rohan34]

getting these recommendations now almost feels like a joke... but it's interesting that people actually thought of it. it was surely baffling when it released

[@TweenkPL]

9:19 I actually typed this comment with voice input on my cell phone

[@travelvideos]

That was the peak of public sector employment 7.07 million persons. Now it is down to about 5 million.

[@CountScarlioni]

That's down to those pesky microcomputers again. Give a manager a machine that does two people's jobs for the price of one, and that's a guaranteed p45 in the post the next morning!

[@RustyLightningPhoto]

This 'world wide information society' sounds interesting.

[@itsmarmalade]

It took 40 years and a pandemic, but yes! Word processing helped!

[@shaider1982]

10:28 Talk about being spot on.

[@peterandersson3812]

I want a micro writer!

[@dornam99]

Hmmm, this feels so much like watching an episode of Look Around You.

[@ozzsoundandlighting]

Thanks Matthew. Thatthew.

[@halfbakedproductions7887]

It still blows my mind that people honestly think that show is real.

[@Eccual]

World wide... information network. So close

[@unnamedchannel1237]

This will be good if an international pandemic hits

[@u.v.s.5583]

Tomorrow there will be no pandemics. Penicillin and other modern antibiotics will take care of that.

[@halfbakedproductions7887]

BT admitted offhand that we would have been in serious trouble if the pandemic had landed even in 2015, because the fibre rollout wasn't far enough along and mass WFH in the way that we saw would be a really tough ask. But by 2020 things were a lot different. I think if this pandemic had landed in the 1990s, we'd probably have been screwed. The choice would have been carry on as normal and face mass death, or lock everything down to the point of starvation and the economy being damaged beyond repair because nobody could work. At least in 2020 we had the technology to work remote in a serious way, keep in touch at a distance, buy things online and so on, whereas in 1995 we absolutely didn't. The only saving grace is that the pandemic would have been slower getting here because international travel in those days wasn't as good, and especially so in China which was pretty underdeveloped at that time.