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

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

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

@@apeshitmediaHover boards and flying cars obviously.

And people taking videos vertically.

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

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

Thank You :)

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.

Right!

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.

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.

@@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".

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”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other way round. :)

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.

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.

@@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!

I bet you would ;)

Don't forget Freff!

Tom Baker's brother?

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

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

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

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

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.

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... :)

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

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.

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.

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

@@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.

@@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.

@@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.

(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.

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

I wonder if he was related to the Terrahawks Zeroids

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

BS, each respective parliamentary journals runs at 1.3 GB-OCRed and as a PDF

@@NathanDudani I was thinking of digitized as pure text files, like the works of many classic authors at the Gutenberg site.

@@NathanDudaniis that one of those PDFs with the pictures embedded though? That will inflate the data size significantly.

The Xerox word processor of 1984 had advanced from 18-inch to ten-inch floppies.

⁠@@TheDavidlloydjones - Ten-inch? Surely they would have been eight-inch, (shown in the video at 9:22), the industry standard of the day? (Superseded by five-inch). I’ve never heard of eighteen-inch floppy disks.

@@AtheistOrphan Yes, now that I think of it, mine had 8" floppy

Yes and also the sound of the dot matrix printer - heavenly.

@@TheDavidlloydjones - Having done a bit more research and consulted with some old IT professionals, I can confirm that both the ‘Eighteen-inch’ and ‘Ten-inch’ floppies you mentioned never existed. Indeed, an ‘Eighteen-inch’ floppy would simply be impossible to work.

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

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.

@@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!!!

Wow that must have been strange for you and them

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

I scrapped one of those in 1999 because it wasn't Y2K compliant. The PDP11 went to a collector but the RL02 drives (still working) went into the skip. Best not to think about that now.

must of come straight from the video disc. Not sure but never seen one do that before. I`ve got a BBC Acorn 3000 in my living room. I`ll try and find out.

It will have done yes. The BBC Micro couldn't play back a respectable video clip itself

An early version of the Domesday Project equipment!

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

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. 🙂

@@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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

me

Me.

Me, this morning!

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

@@fburton8 just found mine. Good luck

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)

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.

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

Let's not confuse the medium with the message 😅

@@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.)

It's the perfect background noise if you want to sleep

I was waiting for him to type GO NORTH

I distinctly remember my father telling me in the mid-1990s that his new laptop had a 1 Gb HDD and he wondered how he could ever possibly fill up that much space.

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.

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

They were horrible years the 1980’s, so much unemployment and dread.

I had the 16k RAM pack. You could spend hours typing some code, knock the RAM pack and lose it all. I shouldn't complain. My first Physics teacher at secondary school in the 80s encouraged me with science/engineering and recommended a book on an upcoming programming language - C ! Our local bookshop had to order it from the USA and it cost my poor Dad about £50 in 1983. Forty years later and with a PhD in Electronics I shouldn't be fazed by the pace of change, but my God, how far have we come. Moore's law.

@@drmal I remember the open PCB that stood vertically from a main board edge connector with 16 off, 1k ic's. Those were the good old days. I have spent the last 30 year writing PLC code, all from those humble beginnings.

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.

@@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.

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

@@Nightweaver1 Indeed!

So, did you have 6 GB or 6 Gb?