1982: The Future of COMPUTER STORAGE | The Computer Programme | Retro Tech | BBC Archive

"Data, it's been around for thousands of years, but now it's running into trouble." - Ian McNaught-Davis
Chris Serle and Ian McNaught-Davis consider storing and retrieving information in the age of the microprocessor. The sheer amount of information that computers can generate, and the speed at which they can do it, has left traditional means of information storage - namely books - unable to keep pace. What is the solution?
Chris and Mac look at the evolution of computer storage, from the humble punch card to floppy disks, video discs and hard-drives.
Clip taken from The Computer Programme, originally broadcast on BBC One, 1 February 1982.
Got an itch for retro computing that needs scratched? Check out the BBC's Computer Literacy Project Archive: clp.bbcrewind....
You have now entered the BBC Archive, a time machine that will transport you back to the golden age of TV to educate, entertain and enlighten you with classic clips from the BBC vaults.
Make sure you subscribe so that you never miss a single stop on our amazing journey through the BBC Archive - www.youtube.co...

[@apeshitmedia]

4 decades later and we have 4k video on our mobile phones. It's incredible the speed that technology has progressed.

[@AndrewWilsonStooshie]

Not just 4K video but any video in the world that anyone has published.

[@apeshitmedia]

@@AndrewWilsonStooshie very true, accessibility is also incredible. Imagine things in 50 years!

[@ThePancakeJedi]

@@apeshitmediaHover boards and flying cars obviously.

[@CT-vm4gf]

And people taking videos vertically.

[@jonah1976]

Yes. 4K video on a 6 inch screen. The phones got smarter. The people didn't.

[@jimsimpson1006]

I remember watching these computer programmes in the early 1980s. I never imagined I'd be watching them again with such nostalgia in the 2020s.

[@RicardoMusch]

On your telephone, on the go, from anywhere in the world.

[@petermainwaringsx]

Just thinking that myself. I remember using medium wave radios with a directional aerial about a meter across and managing to tune into US East Coast radio stations in the 60's and 70's. Now I can use the same device I'm watching this on to get sound and video from all over the world. Although I was always a Sci-Fi fan, I cannot remember anyone predicting the Internet, certainly not in the 21st century. What wonders will my grandchildren witness.

[@joebloggsgogglebox]

Something I learned from this video: the origin of the word byte = "by eight"

[@rollingtroll]

Right!

[@marnanel]

the trouble with that etymology is that originally bytes weren't necessarily 8 bits. Some computers in the 1960s had 6 or 9 bits in a byte.

[@StuartBradyAKAZub]

What @marnanel said. Adding slightly: eight-bit bytes were actually quite unusual in the very early days. Machines often had an 18-bit or 36-bit ‘word’ (and there were also those that worked in decimal using e.g. ‘two-out-of-five’ code, and not binary as we know it). It was the IBM S/360 family and later the PDP-11 that really popularised the use of 8-bit bytes. (Also, Cray-1 was ahead of its time here, curiously, but not many organisations had a Cray.) By the time home micros arrived, all of the main choices of CPU for them used 8-bit bytes.

[@ross302ci]

@@marnanel I looked into this a little on Wikipedia and sources there say the term, as coined by Werner Buchholz, referred to the smallest amount of information a computer could process, or "bite" off at a time. Spelling it as "byte" was to avoid confusion if mutated from "bite" to "bit".

[@oblongscone]

It was just the amount of bits that a computer would store a character in. Not necessarily eight. It was a “bite” of data that was spelled “byte” to avoid confusion with “bit”.

[@iraceruk]

Now we have memory cards in our phones as tiny as your little finger nail that store hundreds of albums full of music, movies, thousands of photographs etc. Amazing.

[@fafski1199]

Yep, a £80 fingernail sized 1TB MicroSD card has enough data capacity to store around 1.25 million books. Which is around 15 times as many books that where being stored in that large library. It's utterly mind blowing when you really think about it.

[@AtheistOrphan]

11:23 - BBC Micro and a Philips VideoDisc player. Memories!

[@Innesb]

I’m sure the “NO PET PEEVES” title that Max mentioned was a play on words relating to the Commodore Pet, as the rest of the title mentioned the Commodore VIC20.

[@MeppyMan]

Correct. Wonder if they knew what it meant but were just leaving as an inside joke for some of the audience.

[@richardhedderly]

The irony that the VIC-20 was originally the MicroPet.

[@bobbastian760]

Can you imagine a program this technical being on mainstream TV today?

[@mmadmic]

No, except with naked dancers to keep the audience entertain.

[@mattbosley3531]

Don't know about the BBC but I could see it being on PBS.

[@krashd]

Yes, that would be BBC Click.

[@ajs41]

This was when we had just 3 channels in the UK.

[@Ian_zlham]

I vaguely remember the TV program on the BBC, this was the start of my career in computing

[@user-fed-yum]

This is incredibly accurate and knowledgeable reporting for its time. It's easy to forget (or not even know) how much more intelligent the average computer user had to be back then.

[@damianbutterworth2434]

Thank You :)

[@the123king]

Older computers were both much more complicated, and much more simple. Modern systems abstract much of the "complicated" bits away from the user with elaborate coding and great deals more processing power. Whereas the older computers were simple enough for a single person to understand the entire working of one machine.

[@flaggerify]

That's because only nerds used them then.

[@damianbutterworth2434]

@@flaggerify intelligent nerds. :)

[@AtheistOrphan]

The legendary Ian McNaught-Davis. (‘Mac’)

[@marnanel]

(Ronnie Barker voice) Later in the programme we'll be interviewing three legendary British computer scientists: Ian McNaught-Davis, Ian McOne-Davis, and Ian McOne-Naught-Davis.

[@AtheistOrphan]

@@marnanel - Brilliant! (It’s good night from me). 👓 👓

[@thesushifiend]

I wonder if he was related to the Terrahawks Zeroids

[@halesworth01]

I remember 1983 in high school (UK) we had a full IBM Winchester 'server' in our school, we learnt BASIC programming, but it is hard to think 4 decades later how things are today! If I remember it was only a few hundred Mb (which was huge back then) Now I have a home PC with two 2Tb Nvme drives, two 1 Tb SSD's, one 1Tb 'spinny' HDD, 64Gb RAM, a 6 core processor, and a 12Gb GPU! A lot of this tech' in my PC is already 'out of date'! Things are moving so fast, and only getting quicker! I also remember dial up for the internet (I was still using this 10 years ago) Now I have 1Gb per second download and 200 Mbps upload, I can download 18gb of information in around a minute....how long would that have taken with dial up!....days I would think!

[@kevinskipp2762]

1gb (gigabit) internet is around 100mb (megabyte) per second. So around 3 minutes for 18Gb (gigabytes) of data. On dialup I remember it was around 4 minutes for a megabyte of data when it was working well. Data rates were fairly unstable though. But if we assume it goes at full tilt the whole time that works out at around 50/51 days depending on whether you say a Gb is 1000 or 1024 Mb

[@nickk6518]

The good old days when the BBC educated viewers without patronising the audience and without annoying background music. And I had one of those BBC micro computers, bought it with the proceeds of working during university holidays - before student grants were abolished and before Polytechnics were transformed into Universities.

[@iamrocketray]

I couldn't afford a BBC Micro and had to do with a rubbery keys Spectrum. Today I'm using a minisforum UM780 XTX Mini PC with an Oculink connection to my eGPU(external Graphics Processing Unit). I have a large Tower gaming PC standing Idle. my mini PC does everything my gaming PC does but at a fraction of the size and uses less power than an old fashioned light bulb. When gaming I just turn on the eGPU, it uses more power of course but it will play any game I throw at it, It will even run my VR setup. I predict in 5 years I wont even need an eGPU to play even the most demanding simulations.

[@bardo0007]

@@iamrocketray Somehow Commodore 64 with the best keyboard were never big in the UK unlike in the rest of the world.

[@iamrocketray]

@@bardo0007 At the time Cambridge in UK was the home of innovation in Micro PC's. And apart from the price I wouldn't have considered a Commodore 64 because British made PC's had their operating system on an EPROM(a writable chip) and American PC's had to have the OS loaded from disc.

[@bardo0007]

@@iamrocketray Nope OS BASIC/KERNAL was on ROM for the C-64. So you could start programming in BASIC , just like with ZX Spectrum when you switched it on.

[@iamrocketray]

@@bardo0007 I didn't know that, I would have loved a commadore 64 but like the BBC micro it was way out of my price league so I didn't give it very much attention.

[@chrisbarnes2823]

I remember when I started my career in 1974 we had slide rules, then LED calculators arrived! Oh how things have changed. My parents were born deaf, so when I moved to Canada snail mail was the medium of contact. Now we use IPads and FaceTime and can easily talk to each other.

[@edmundpower1250]

Wow that must have been strange for you and them

[@chrisbarnes2823]

@@edmundpower1250 not really just normal, I grew up in a Deaf community, nobody used phones.

[@martindooley4439]

I used to love that show back in the day.

[@fremenondesand3896]

in 2005 I dreamed about how wonderful a small, silent, low power computer with internet access would be, as back then, there was a lot of written information and I was inclined to read it all. We got that more or less with the mobile phone. It does 99.9% of everyones computing needs now.

[@Emilya-A]

"The Soviet Technical Physics Letter... Dear Ivan, I want to talk to you about the effect of an external electric field on the velocity of a surface acoustic wave in a lithium niobate single crystal."

[@Emilya-A]

That is like a homework problem you have to derive it yourself with the more basic equations they're not just giving it away

[@scottread]

It was all so futuristic at the time.

[@calanm7880]

Speak for yourself! Soviet Physics Letters Volumes are the perfect holiday reading - but now I take it on Kindle so there’s more room for duty free on return leg

[@cdl0]

One of my old colleagues was a translator for these Soviet Physics journals. They are packed with invaluable information.

[@mattbosley3531]

I carry around 10k books on my iPad. That's something I never would have thought possible in the early eighties. I had a Commodore 64 with a floppy drive for storage.

[@cdl0]

@@mattbosley3531 Indeed, imagine how floppy disks appeared to those using punched paper tapes and cards a decade earlier.

[@mattbosley3531]

@@cdl0 I used punchcards and tapes, and disk packs with mainframe computers. I used to be blazing fast on a keypunch machine.

[@cdl0]

@@mattbosley3531 Ah yes, those were the days, but how fast could you deposit the bootloader into the core memory from the switches on the front panel? 🙂

[@peterwexler5737]

Excelent presentation.

[@Ingens_Scherz]

Nostalgia apart (and there is so much of that!), what I really miss from this era are the keyboards. They were chunky, satisfying and epic (with notable exceptions ;)

[@damianbutterworth2434]

I`ve got a BBC Acorn 3000 in my living room. :)

[@B00MERTEC]

You can buy a proper beam spring f-type for your pc today, buy they do cost a few hundred pounds. Worth it though.

[@krashd]

When keyboards had curly cables like your granny's telephone.

[@turboslag]

When the BBC did things properly. Our family business bought it's first pc in 1982, from memory it was called a Sirius. Can't recall the spec but it was one of the fastest of it's time. Oh the excitement when it printed the first invoice!! Of course the transformational technology was the internet, that made computers relevant to everyone on an everyday level, then the smartphone established it as essential. Books are still a passion for me though, nothing else can replace their tactile pleasure, but I buy them online!!

[@dean6816]

BBC was at its peak around here and the very thing they're talking about will be the thing that ruins them!

[@jgharston]

From memory, a Victor Sirius was 8088 (cut-down 8086) with 128K memory, upgradable to 800K-ish of RAM and a weird form of floppy drive.

[@turboslag]

@@jgharston You are possibly correct, I just can't remember the details and all the records, and the pc itself are long gone. However, I do still have a couple of the Tulip PC's from our later multi terminal network system, and the ms dos user manuals that were supplied with them. The file server was a 286 machine, with a mighty 80 MB hard drive!!!

[@Grumpy_old_Boot]

In my phone, I have a 1 TerraByte MicroSD card, about the size of a pinky finger nail .... crazy !

[@kennixox262]

It shows at least in the studio shots just how good analog PAL was compared to NTSC of the time.

[@ZacabebOTG]

The BBC does have some pretty amazing technology to separate luma and chroma though; the PAL Transform Decoder. It works in the frequency domain and uses the complimentary phase shift from line to line caused by PAL inverting the V chroma carrier and resulting spectral symmetry in the chroma subcarrier to quite precisely determine what is luma and what is chroma, better than any regular comb filter can. With traditional notch filtering or even an adaptive comb filter it would not have looked this good. It's almost as if they'd recorded it as Y/C from the start. 🙂

[@kennixox262]

@@ZacabebOTG IT does look good. Lived in the UK with a dual standard PAL/NTSC Sony Trinitron. My only complaint about PAL was the 50hz flicker. Still, the difference in resolution was day and night. Now with digital television, it looks very good globally. BBC radio was also very good with regards to sound quality, lack of commercials and live concerts. Really liked that. Have not listened to FM in nearly 20 years. I presume that since the BBC is not constrained by "commercial" issues, they spent more on quality. Still, looking at some of the BBC video in this space really showcases just how good analog can be and yes, even done right NTSC can look very very good. I think that the major complaints were with regards to early NTSC color equipment before solid state and the improved circuits. But still, 525 lines compared to 625 makes a difference. Just my take as a casual observer.

[@domfjbrown75]

BBC FM is still far better than DAB on anything from a good entry level Denon or Sony tuner from the early 90s... DAB+ is pretty good, but my 1993 Sony (a tenner from a charity shop a few years back) stays. Even the tuning rotary encoder (digital synthesis) is weighted and metal. Absolutely lush bit of kit.

[@tonythemadbrit9479]

As a retired broadcast engineer, the old joke was NTSC, never the same colour, PAL, perfection at last. The French and Russians may argue too about SECAM being better than both.

[@rollingtroll]

I am not sure if I feel old that I'm 2 years younger than this video, or whether I should be impressed how quickly it all went.

[@krashd]

You only have to read a handful of comments to see you're likely one of the youngest people here.

[@PJBonoVox]

I can't imagine these presenters could have conceived of how much we'd take this for granted in the near future. This really was a game-changing tine period right here.

[@mattsan70]

Ian Mac could - he was a visionary ahead of his time

[@ajs41]

Absolutely. Just 10 years after this the internet started to go mainstream amongst people interested in technology, and 5 years after that with the public as a whole.

[@Ray.Norrish]

That orange ME29 mainframe at 10:20 brought back some memories. I was using one of them at work in around 88-89 and remember going to get discs from the store to put in the drives and using some hefty double-deck hostess trolley thing to wheel about 8 of those disc platters back. Just changing a disc was a 30 min job with all the walking around. I remember the computer room had a halon type fire system in it which (I was told) had pressure pads in the floor to make sure there was no-one in there when it went off...!

[@philglew-deval]

Crazy really isnt it. Back in the 80s, we had to buy tape to store a few KBs, and now any of us can get PBs of data storage with a few clicks. Mental.

[@BenjyDale]

I recently upgraded 2 computers with 4 terabyte NVMe m.2 drives, and they're only the size of RAM chips and weigh just a few grammes. I remember 5.25" disks holding about 1.2 megabytes and the smaller 3.5" disks taking about 1.4 megabytes. My first PC (in 1999) had a 6.4 gigabyte hard drive. How storage has moved on!

[@meagain3876]

Seeing that old ICL dumb terminal takes me back. We had a Series 39 mainframe, though I think it replaced a Series 2900 before I started working there.

[@martin-uz1py]

Thousands of years later and you can still read Egyptian hieroglyphs, I wonder how many floppy and laser discs will be readable in a thousand years.

[@electroman1996]

Zero. Floppy disks aren't reliable for long term memory storage. Even after 40 years, many of them are not readable anymore, especially when stored under bad conditions (moisture, heat, etc)

[@fabianmckenna8197]

Agreed but at least our grandchildren won't have to rummage through thousands of old photographs in boxes. Just spent ten days clearing out my late father's home with the aforementioned photos as well as slides and some negatives dating back to the 1930's. Actually bought myself an Epson V600 scanner and finding some lovely old photos of my great grandparents. Problem for the kids will be finding thousands upon thousands of jpegs on computers, flash drives, SD cards, portable HDD and SSD drives etc! We tend to snap pictures of anything and everything these days and copy onto drives to save them whereas in the "old days" we had a film roll of 24/36 so unlikely to go mad.

[@scaredyfish]

To be fair, of all the ancient Egyptian papyruses produced, the number that are still readable is pretty minuscule.

[@dudmanjohn]

Let's not confuse the medium with the message 😅

[@Jumansa19]

@@fabianmckenna8197 and even in the old times: most pictures seen a million times other ones - often in better quality. No photo bring back passed away people, sometimes is even good to forget (try to - the hurt often doesn't go away compete and kicks in the worst moments, so at least it is better not to force memory that make us sad.)

[@sleekitwan]

We were introduced to punched cards as a data input method for mainframe computers, and I literally knew, this couldn’t possibly be hanging around long. I just knew I’d not be interested until that malarkey was over. The pace of development was actually pretty slow because this stuff had limited sales numbers back then. Hard work to use them. It’s much more interesting to me now, as a user, being able to create music on devices. Things really got going, once most people began using a computer daily, or indeed had a use for one at all. Thanks for the history lesson.

[@Corgipaw_Films]

These were the types of hardware I used when I worked as a mainframe computer operator and programmer in the 1980s. Good times.

[@Mr_Wibble]

Same here - ICL EDS80 with FDS160 below. I was also a lot quicker loading that drive, especially when the disk to disk backups had to be finished before end of shift!

[@thesteelrodent1796]

"It takes no time at all", he says while they sit staring at the screen for nearly a minute waiting for the result =D. Interestingly, much of all that paper and books they show in this, is very much still only in paper form and has yet to be digitized, so you still need to sift through these computer indexes to find what you're looking for, and then go for a walk to locate the actual material This was 1982. Only five years later, in 1987, came the first proper CD-ROM drives for home computers (although they were super expensive) and everything they talked about in this program as being "in the far future", became present day tech. Computer technology evolved so incredibly fast in those days. Nowadays everything only becomes crappier each day and all this wonderful information is harder to find

[@jgharston]

"And this floppy is twice as big, so it can hold twice as much" aaaarrrgghhh!!!!!!!! :) 8-inch 75K floppy vs 5.25-inch 400K floppy!

[@kevinnivek8907]

We also had double density then dual sided 5.25’s shattering the 1MB ceiling for storage!

[@nufe]

And who hasn't lost a micro SD card?

[@fidelcatsro6948]

me

[@jeshkam]

Me.

[@kieronparr3403]

Me, this morning!

[@fburton8]

@@kieronparr3403 I didn't lose one this morning either! (Well, it's only 10:45 so there still time I suppose.)

[@kieronparr3403]

@@fburton8 just found mine. Good luck

[@richard-davies]

Really is amazing how much storage we can hold these days. With current Micro SD cards topping out at 1.5TB for now, you easily hold almost 100TB of data in the palm of your hands and it would barley weigh anything 😮

[@mmadmic]

My first HDD was 20 MB (MegaBytes), and I never ever fully filled it. And now, I have nearly 80TB at home and I'm thinking of buying a few disks because it's nearly full.

[@eddieafterburner]

6:02 Guy at the terminal is the OG prompt jockey

[@richardhedderly]

I was waiting for him to type GO NORTH

[@grahammcdonald]

We’ve come so far in my lifetime.

[@DarkLight748]

Took a brief look at the whole programme as linked in the description, what is with the terrible quality and framerate? Would be nice if one day we could have a remastered estored archive of all these programmes, like this and the Computer Chronicles. Also, my computer can store over one millions books, what what do I use is for? Games.

[@KellicTiger]

Meanwhile I have 2TB of storage on something as large as my thumbnail. Or 120TB on my home NAS.

[@mehere3013]

this will be good when it happens, future looks bright

[@Kazuo1G]

5:12: Nice 4k ROM. :P

[@JosephFallon]

"Mind your thumb" - good Lord

[@GrannyDryden]

"It's got a spring on it like Arkwright's Till!" :D

[@antiWhiteism777]

What was that removable hard disk called?

[@krashd]

Harold

[@BillyNoMates1974]

software developers should watch videos like this to learn efficient coding. back then there wasnt the memory or hard drive space for sloppy coding.... unlike today

[@Innesb]

This is a common trope, but the truth is that modern computers enable more people to develop more software that can be used to improve efficiency in many areas. The efficiencies of modern development outweigh the benefits of optimising code; there are diminishing returns in optimising code. Coders haven’t become sloppy because they have more storage and faster processors; there is just minimal (or no) benefit in developing ultra efficient and optimised code for most applications these days. For example, a simple algorithm on a modern computer might require thousands of lines of code (including libraries), and the code might be relatively inefficient, but it’s still going to run thousands (millions?) of times faster than a beautifully optimised version of the same algorithm that was developed 40 years ago. A more practical example; I can create a user-friendly user input screen in a couple of hours, including all the error trapping and user-friendly elements. The resulting code might be 10,000 times ‘larger’ than something similar that was developed 40 years ago, but it will display faster, be easier to use and cost almost nothing in terms of storage and processing. Debugging is easy because it uses a common library that thousands of other developers are familiar with, and doesn’t require the unique knowledge of a developer who had to create a special encoding technique to save a few bytes of memory, or some weird trick to store off-screen characters in the computer’s printer buffer, which causes the device to crash when someone actually connects a printer.

[@BillyNoMates1974]

@@Innesbyou make a good point however just expecting computer hardware and libraries to pick up the pieces will only get you so far. yes coputers are getting faster but people can write some truely horrible code is still horrible code and no amoutn of processing power will save your day. you say debugging is easier but thats not always the case with false results given back when searching through code. Then there are issues like async coding and race conditions. librabry debugging tools wont help you in those cases. a good understanding of the code base are essential then. which comes back to writing efficent code. in my line of work, we have ended up re-writing code that looked good at the time but now the software has a higher demand and the original code just wont scale to what is required now. maybe if we took a more grounded approach in the past would save us time now.

[@FurQ69]

Forward to today and that whole buildings contents can be stored on a 1tb SD card the size of a finger nail.

[@redmustangredmustang]

1:38. There's a famous picture of Bill Gates and it shows just stacks of paper going up meters up a tree and he is in a harness showing a CD. The CD replacing ALL that paper and it's amazing that the CD and now thumb drives can replace thousands and even millions of pages that would have taken up an entire library.

[@BrayTube]

Ahhh, finite search. Those were the days!

[@krognak]

1:55 No!! You must not read from the book!

[@thefudgerunner]

How refreshing to hear a presenter that can speak clearly.

[@octaviussludberry9016]

Without a speech impediment, or regional or worse yet, a foreign accent?

[@pinlap3875]

@@octaviussludberry9016 or, what would be worse, female /s

[@unnamedchannel1237]

Saying “like” every 3 seconds

[@fburton8]

@@octaviussludberry9016 Exactly! There's so much of that on the wireless and tv these days. Even the BBC! ☹

[@marnanel]

​@Symptomless_Coma_what, Welsh?

[@pjcnet]

Imagine showing them a 4TB SSD that is so cheap most people can afford it.

[@Satscape]

The "one million bytes" bit. I downloaded this video, it's 238 million bytes...1600 floppy disks? (3&half inch)

[@brandyballoon]

I didn't know there were hard drives with removable platters!

[@grhinson]

OCR baby...

[@jaffarbh]

A computer (with a 1MB of storage) was considered a solution that's looking for problems to solve. Amazing how far we have come so far :)

[@Nightweaver1]

And now we have AI, a solution looking for problems to solve that we have yet to really find.

[@jaffarbh]

@@Nightweaver1 Indeed!

[@savannahjackson8513]

They truly had no idea what was coming… just as we have no idea what’s coming 45 years from now.

[@Nightweaver1]

I'm going to guess quantum computers that have basically unlimited storage space with the functional intelligence of a human being that you can directly interact with in casual language.

[@ShawnGBR]

I like to reference videos like this when someone online is being a Luddite about some up and coming technology (electric cars, artificial intelligence, and so on) - it’s fun to remind people that their pessimistic comments might be here in a few decades, to be laughed at by people in the near future. Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to watch some more video on my tiny pocket phone that has the storage capacity of multiple Laserdiscs.

[@aboriginesdream]

It will never catch on

[@Emilya-A]

Wow, composting toilets on the BBC in 1982! I think someone was building an illegal tiny home with a composting toilet on the Venice Beach boardwalk recently on the German in Venice youtube channel

[@gearheadgregwi]

What's a "library"?😂 This Gen-X remembers sitting in the library thinking "If only I could have all this information wireless, anywhere. I could rule the world!"

[@stevens78]

And now servers around the world store idiots videos from about billions of people worldwide... 😂

[@JJONNYREPP]

1982: The Future of COMPUTER STORAGE | The Computer Programme | Retro Tech | BBC Archive 0835am 29.5.24 imagine a mere cruddy C-60 cassette could store a game for you to programme/play into the spectrum... all that noise and the fuzzy multi coloured screen as it booted up the game giving rise to 1: innate epilepsy 2: confusion 3: lethargy..... in my case the latter. top games being the: young ones bachelor boys, luna jet man and pac man....

[@octaviussludberry9016]

There is a reason for that. Your data and how they sell you stuff.

[@JJONNYREPP]

@@octaviussludberry9016 1982: The Future of COMPUTER STORAGE | The Computer Programme | Retro Tech | BBC Archive 084am 29.5.24 which is all imbued with inbuilt obsolescence...

[@fidelcatsro6948]

meowtube🐱👍🏿

[@jeshkam]

​@@octaviussludberry9016CIA & NSA.

[@peterodonnell5820]

I'm sorry, but looking at Chris Serle's height, the oddly-fitting jacket, the big hands, and the hair I was immediately reminded of Wallace and Gromit. And no, I'm posting a picture of what I looked like in the early 80's....

[@Ginger_Dalek]

1982: "We can store vast amounts of information on one laser disc." 2024: "Discs? How quaint!"

[@videogamebookreviews]

He has to put in some effort to lift it. 9:35

[@testtest-bb2dt]

Is he Bob Willis' brother?

[@SlowMotionDE]

The 15.5 kHz noise starting at 02:25 is a bit annoying. Maybe @BBC Archive could edit that out with a filter?

[@TinLeadHammer]

So sad that even the BBC presenters used to say "cassette tape" instead of "tape cassette". Then again, a magnetic recording is made on tape, while one would write a label on a cassette.

[@DaveMcIroy]

0:10 - did he just body shame a book? 😯

[@toyguy1956]

Anyone see the irony most people are watching this probably shot on film on a device that is a billion times faster than anyone in the 80s could have imagined

[@DeepGreenForest]

This might be the English John C Dvorak

[@stefanhennig]

Our current solution to storing data for the next generations is: we don't. If e.g. KZbin shuts down or decides to use its hardware rather for bitcoin mining then there is nothing we can do to save our precious videos. Same with most of our other data in a cloud. I think the one of the next generations will be called the hapless one, or maybe even the clueless. So much data is already rotting away.

[@VLC8792]

Video Disk - close but no cigar.

[@PeBoVision]

Composting toilets..."perhaps they will be useful in the Hymalayas" Or, in the 21st century, in a myriad of tiny & mobile homes around the globe! It is noteworthy that an entry intended to examine the future of digital storage, so poorly predicted the future of commodes. Then again, they compare digital storage to complex hieroglyphs, when digital storage is far simpler, quite literally comprised of two symbols...zero & one (representing on/off). I am not criticizing the BBC reporting, but am instead finding humour in the difficulty we once had understanding the technology that would eventually become our defining zeigeist, mahking it far more contrived than it ever was. (I have over 100TB's of storage across my various NAS systems in my media-focused home-office, in 1982 I was thrilled with my 192K floppy drive (100TB's was science fiction). Thank you for the brilliant piece of nostalgia from a more innocent time.

[@LotsOfS]

Imagine all the fascinating things we are completely failing to predict today.

[@jeshkam]

"Great news!"

[@BigKelvPark]

When the BBC was actually fit for purpose. To be fair we didn't have a lot of choice then of watch.

[@nzoomed]

It really makes me cringe looking back at where technology was.

[@Red-Revolution708]

Since the early 2000’s technology has excelled so fast.

[@haroldbishop5314]

They failed consider how much misinformation would fit on each format. 🙁

[@ShorrockPeter]

It won't matter what comes out technology wise we will never be able to keep up you buy something one day and the next day it's out of date Samsung a prime example building mobile phones and then buy tomorrow something else will come out you will never be able to keep up no matter what technology comes out AI technology wipe all of the other things that' his ever been done out❤

[@Goettel]

Just imagine what people will think watching current day KZbin in 42 years.

[@anthonykoller4459]

Just imagine them seeing the Smartphone and the iPhone and being amazed that what it can do, they would think that it came from a passing UFO 🛸

[@zaftra]

Chirs Serle, the tall one, is still alive and is 80. and the mighty Ian McNaught-Davis died 10 years ago age 84, they live to see it all.

[@fidelcatsro6948]

imagine our smartphones today can store everything contained in the whole array of storage media they had in that studio!🐱👍🏿

[@dean6816]

that hard drive was 1 megabyte (1,000,000 bytes) so a smartphone with 2 terabyte SD card could hold 2,000,000 of them and that's not including the phones storage!!

[@Phoeliz]

do bbc just hire multilple jeremy clarksons to run all the shows?

[@drxym]

And 5 minutes later computer porn was invented

[@malahammer]

Ancient Egyptians Hieroglyphics = emojis 🤓

[@user-jt5vm3mi1w]

Back when they gatekeeped with just an accent

[@gazzmanp]

Ah yes! Laser disk! The future! Oh, wait...🤔

[@mmadmic]

A time when BBC was a TV channel, not a woke propaganda machine

[@koppadasao]

0:30 The book "How to understand women" is twice as thick, and that's just the first volume...

[@Aliblossom]

Spoken by a true straight person.

[@koppadasao]

@@Aliblossom What else should I be? Crooked?

[@Aliblossom]

@@koppadasao I have one question for you guys - you always talk about how you love women but then act like you hate them? In our culture, we respect partners and potential partners alike.

[@koppadasao]

@@Aliblossom What the heck are you talking about?

[@Aliblossom]

@@koppadasao Not sure how I could’ve phrased it. I’ve never met a straight couple who are married and happy, I’ve never seen a man treat a woman as something other than a piece of meat, or a slave, and I’ve never seen more offensive speech be directed to a woman than from a straight person. Your comment is an example of when a person wants a relationship because they want sex, and nothing more, out of a relationship. Correct me if I’m wrong.

[@gump5ter01]

Those 2 could have mad a fortune on only fans had they had the foresight

[@TheDavidlloydjones]

Books have not been around "for thousands of years." Why start off with a huge stupid lie in the first 30 seconds of your broadcast?

[@phipli]

The Etruscan Gold Book is about 2500 years old.

[@AtheistOrphan]

‘Your broadcast’ - A bit late for your comment, this was broadcast in 1982, some 42 years ago. Did you contact the BBC then?

[@PJBonoVox]

Imagine being the kind of moron who (incorrectly) pokes holes in a 42-year old TV programme.

[@ronald3836]

They have been around for thousands of years. Books (e.g. the book of Genesis) used to come in the form of scrolls.

[@marnanel]

I think you're thinking of codices.

[@tasercs]

Ian McNaught-Davis made it to 2014 so he thankfully lived long enough to see 'the future'. What an amazing person, full of knowledge and able to convey it effortlessly (as it seems, were most of the 'real' presenters of that era). I feel very lucky to have lived and learnt through that time.

[@camshaftcasting1451]

And he climbed the Old Man of Hoy on TV!! Google it, you won't be disappinted.

[@marktubeie07]

Who remembers the BBC Doomsday Project - hints of it in this video using the laserdisc.

[@tachikomakusanagi3744]

I used one recently at the Computer Museum in Cambridge. Its quite an experience to use as it feels like an early google maps where you can select any place on the UK map and then read 'reviews' of what its like to live there plus look at local pictures. Where i grew up teenagers seemed to do a lot of Morris dancing.

[@domfjbrown75]

Used it on the children's ward i Exeter Wonford in 1989 after one of my many teeth operations. Got so sucked into it I begged them to let me stay for the rest of the day... :)

[@tonythemadbrit9479]

I was part of the team that made the master discs. Good times at Mullard Blackburn!

[@ajs41]

There's a video on this channel on it.

[@nanpanman1]

I was getting pretty excited by the end of the video! 3000 books on a single video disc!

[@jblyon2]

It won't be long before we can buy 900 classic themes on a two record set for $14.99. Two records!

[@Hans-gb4mv]

And pretty soon we will have to teach kids what a book was.

[@ianmcclellan7695]

We were still using disk-packs like the one you see at 9:36 in the RAF Air Defence System in the early 2000s.

[@flybobbie1449]

My friend was raiding his garage for parts to keep Reuters disc computers going in 2005.

[@anthonykoller4459]

The US Military still uses Floppy Disk to run some of its computers because it’s impossible to hack or to copy unlike today’s system

[@brianquigley1940]

​@anthonykoller4459 Nonsense. Those old machines were easy to hack. You simply can't hack something that is not connected to the net!

[@krashd]

@@anthonykoller4459 The floppy era was the golden age of piracy, you brought 10 blank disks to school in 1990 and the next day your mate would give you them back with 10 games on them 🤣

[@davidcarrol110]

I would have loved to spend an afternoon in that library with "Mac" and Chris Serle back in 1982.

[@ThePancakeJedi]

I bet you would ;)

[@MrRjhyt]

Don't forget Freff!

[@knerduno5942]

Tom Baker's brother?

[@duprie37]

This hints at just how mind-blowingly revolutionary the CD was as a portable storage device. That bar fridge sized hard drive holds 1MB, a CD holds 800MB. It was just insane at the time. It took a fair while but when the writable CD-R finally came along, it was a total game changer. For a little while and then flash drives got big.

[@bardo0007]

My external drive today is 4 Terrabyte! No need for CD's anymore.

[@marnanel]

You watch Look Around You even once, and everything in these old programmes begins to sound like it.

[@mondrus72]

Lol, Peter Serafinowicz is definitely channelling Chris Serle is series 2 of Look Around You.

[@richardhedderly]

The other way round. :)

[@kaitlyn__L]

The studio segments on this channel always make me think of Look Around You, while the filmed interviews with a member of the public (like the recent garden astronomer one) always have the air of a slow-starting Python sketch. Both were of course just sending-up that style, which already existed, but are now much more popular than the material they were lambasting.

[@simonrussell4986]

Synthesiser Patel might argue that the source of the endearing sendup was Tomorrow's World. That is if he wasn't chasing synthesiser thieves - crime's so bloody bad, you know.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@simonrussell4986 you probably know about it already, but if you haven’t seen Still Game he plays a shopkeeper in that and has some of the best lines. A very similar attitude to troublemakers as Synthesiser Patel as well!

[@AtheistOrphan]

Matthew Broderick uses a dual IMSAI FDC-2 8-inch floppy drive (9:22) in the 1983 film ‘War Games’.

[@rossallan3585]

As someone born in 1980, I consider myself somewhat lucky to have really grown up with the home computer and all its potential, without them overly dominating my most formative years. I’ve nowt against the internet or tablets (given I’m typing on a tablet now, over the internet that’d be very silly), just glad my entertainment didn’t rely on it as a kid.

[@rensha8635]

Same and even my computer interested son (who has studied and worked in the computer field) says he would rather have grown up during the 1980’s with the first computer technologies which he says he would have found exciting but without the ability to be bound to a personal device.

[@ThePancakeJedi]

The internet isn’t the problem. It’s social media and how it’s damaging society.

[@CT-vm4gf]

I was also born in 1980 and remember first using the internet as a teen back in the mid 90’s and getting my first pc around the same time. Good memories. We also had Commodore computers back in the 80’s.