All of man's combined knowledge accessible from a device that fits in the palm of your hand. Imagine showing Da Vinci that device..... Fast forward to modern humans and what do we use it for? Gormless social media, cat videos, porn? Sad clown world. *
I would sell my phone to Steve Jobs for a percent of apple. tell him to slowly reverse engineer it over time, and then take my share certificate back to the present and retire at 22.
CP/M is well known and so is Gary. He's a better programmer than Bill Gates, but isn't as salesman nor as cutthroat as Gates. If Gary even got the IBM deal with the XT, he no doubt wouldn't have licensed it and it would have been killed off by OS/2.
@@HardCase1911 He was not that off, the "needle" he mentions is now the smartphone, as far I know, there are more active smartphones than laptops/portable computers.
9:20 "In this little floppy [disk], you have 720kb of storage, so inside the unit you have the ability to have 1.5mb of storage, which is really enough for most applications."
+Wattstone I love watching these for that reason. They talk about 128kb. wow. If they saw my 64GB thumb drive they'd have heart attacks, especially when they heard the price.
"especially when they heard the price." Oh yeah, while the technology has become more capable, it's come *WAY* down in price. Case in point, The Raspberry Pi Zero, given away on the cover of a magazine... in 1985, you got demos of games on a tape on the cover of a magazine, the Raspberry Pi Zero is a full blown *computer* given away on the cover of a magazine with capabilities that 1985 could only dream of (it knocked even the Amiga into a cocked hat)
I ran a small BBS in the mid 80's with maybe a few calls a day and by 1990 had 8 phone lines coming into the house with ST4096's shaking the computers day and night. It was a glorious time discovering hardware and software and making it all work.
It's easy to be smug when judging this stuff by current technological standards. Remembering of course that in 25 years people will look back on the technology we currently use and laugh just as hard.
One of those guys was Gary Kildall... founder of Digital Research and creator of CPM... Laughing at that guy is llaughing at oen of the people that created your world.
@28:04 California DMV announced they are finally almost done catching up from the 1985 backlog and apologize for the 35 year process. One employee, Fred, mentions, "Yea, I was hired in 1985 to work on this project. Been doing it my whole career and now I'm retiring, glad I almost got it done."
Stewart: "With a portable computer, I can check my appointments, work on my script, ship it via modem, even agonize over the show's budget." Stewart was the best, to the day the show ended I know he would always remember the little budget they had.
I feel quite amazed. I remember a time when the computer was a keyboard connected to a TV, a Walkman connected to the keyboard, cassettes with whatever program you wanted to run (in my case, video games) and graphic that had not that much to do with what you are seeing these days, when the concept of an e-mail was Steven Spielberg movies domain, or Star Trek. A time when that brick game, was an actual console, that was running only that game, on lcd screens that later I was going to stare at, at night when I couldn’t sleep, on cell phone, which with the passing of time turned from ginormous bricks to these plastic and metal bits, that I am holding in my hand, typing this comment while waiting the update of GT Sport to finish, so I can race online on a huge Hd Display... in some 20 years.
I remember in 1985 saying how great it would be to have all my comics on a portable computer, and people said I was crazy, that much storage would be impossible.
In the early 90s, I had a 3.5” disk that I labeled “Back to the Future 1, 2, and 3” for when computers got good enough to store movies on a disk. I was kind of right, I guess. ;-) Except now it’s a whole catalog of films in full HD on a micro SD card. Haha. Little me would have been floored.
George Morrow was quite correct when he said he felt the price for the high end enthusiast laptop should settle down to about 2k, while good quality workhorse laptops would be around 1k. That still holds pretty true.
I never heard of the show growing up in the 19080's in the UK. I would have enjoyed it immensely. The coverage of computers on British TV seemed to be limited to BBC Micros and the occasional Commodore, Spectrum or Atari. I heard about many big these developments via the printed press and was up to the minute (well month) from Byte and PCW magazines amongst others.
It didn't take long after that. I remember using a colour LCD in the early '90s on a friend's laptop.... Sega's Game Gear had colour LCD, as did Atari's handheld, so it had to have been around by at least the late '80s.
@@isuzuhombre-lx7jr They are still only a small marginal improvement over high quality LCD screens. Screen quality is unlikely to improve that much in the next 35 years (as compared to the improvements since 35 years ago). There really isn't much more to do with video other than changing it completely to a new novel type, like holographic screens or something. Screens already exceed 300ppi. The best screens look as good as print. Getting bigger isn't much of an issue, especially for handhelds. That limitation is being imposed by pockets, not technology. I don't see TVs getting that much bigger. 60" is already pushing the limits of the comfort of viewing a screen.
Morrow defending the 5 1/4" floppy with an absolute passion is hilarious. Had the foresight to say that flat panel screens with color were going to be the future, but still defended the floppy.
OMG! The size of that laptop at the beginning was huge! I laughed when the cab driver asked where to. The guy pulls out this monster of a laptop just to check..lol
"What if" analysis. Amazing. Our modern programming language's don't even have "What if" instructions anymore. Just regular old "if". The ancients really knew what they were doing.
This look back into the "early days" of computing is very interesting, especially the myopic view of what the average user needs. I felt sorry for George Morrow. He was talking up his portable computers, but his company went belly up later the same year.
I love all the optimism and possibilities you get from these old shows. The futute looked so bright. I wonder what some of these people on this program (if still alive) would make of current time we live in, with the emerging addiction and depression caused by the mass adoption of super powerful portable computers, ala, mobile phones?
I just bought a 16TB thumb drive for $20... Hard to believe that it's 700 million times the storage of those 3.25" floppy disks... at a tiny fraction (and size) of the price of a floppy drive. Makes you wonder what the future holds.
I honestly miss the 'old days' of computing. Back in the 80s & 90s they were making breakthrough after breakthrough and there was healthy competition between manufacturers. Things just feel different now, like oh look the new version of my laptop has marginal improvements over last year's model and so-and-so is suing their competitor again.
I agree, but this is the nature of engineering. You can say the same about airliners, cars, etc. Software is the same. It's sad, but there. Just be glad you were around then!
Your laptop today costs a weekly wage, not five monthly salaries, and has enough power to work perfectly fine for the next few years, unlike those 80s machines which often were obsolete as soon as you left the store.
@@lawrencemanningwoh there nerd. Your a computer guy. I'm a pilot. Don't throw in "airliners" arbitrarily. By airliners you mean planes with jet engines, and they've been essentially the same improving slightly in efficiency since the 60s. They've barely changed. Not to mention we still fly turbo props also which have been the same since their inception pretty much as well.
@@OhFishyFishback in the 80s, people got computers mostly for having a word processor and they had printers. The cpu was slow, ram and storage were small, but you only used word basically (for most people) to print stuff. Fast forward today, most people don't use word processors (unless they're in school or writing for a business), and most people especially don't have printers either. No one buys a printer anymore to print out something every once in a while when everything is electronic. Heck the fact we get so much paper Mail still should be considered unusual.
@@davidt8087 IBM clones sure, but C64, Atari 600/800, Amstrads, Spectrums, those were popular home computers used mostly for gaming and fun, and those were gateways for life-long careers in IT for many people. I learned Basic programming from a German manual that came with my C64. I couldn't speak a word in German, so I would just copy the code, run it, and see what happens. Those home computers lasted for years, but business machines were outdated within months and some costed more than a car. There's nothing to miss about those days, other than nostalgia for the long gone youth.
In 85 I worked at Computerland and they let me take home a Data General 1. Not even backlit. I went to Steak n shake and had people coming over to see it.
19:00 George Morrow was trying to pitch an 5" disk drive, that most portable manufacturers already did not include in their portables, it was being phased out just as 8" disks earlier. This strategy didn't work, as Morrow Designs filed for bankrupcy the same year, and George Morrow retired after that and, according to Wikipedia, spent time digitizing and restoring jazz records. Trials and mostly errors were what led to such progress in the industry.
The 5.25" disk drives were a smart move and actually worked making the model a good seller. What went wrong is that Morrow practically gave the design away to Zenith, who then won a very large government contract to sell their version of it. For the record, in 1985 the 5.25" disk drives weren't on their way out yet. The IBM PS/2, introduced in 1987, moved to the 3.5" format. That would've given Morrow's design plenty of life.
In 2015 dollars, those machines in the 10-12 minute segment would be between $6300 and $10,500. For 128k, a 300 baud modem, and a "double capacity" 3.5" floppy drive. Sweet.
While Japanese and Indians from east were forecasting technology under radar of western money. Long story short, very few of us forego the political and ideological ego while focussing on true human passion of karma.. and rest of us slobs while enjoying the fruits from trees laid by seeds of such few ones karma..talks and talks about religion and trump and shit and do nothing....to be honest..if one as human can think he is being slob to society..he/she should change right now or kill themselves in the hope of best for next reincarnation
On second thought, those guys who showed today's kids like laptop..if only had adopted DOS OS at the time..I wonder there brand name would have been known today too...
The guy from Morrow Designs really wasn't liking that HP machine, even though in my opinion, it was the clear winner. Unix, has data stored on memory chips (not an SSD, but pretty damn fast battery backed RAM), and lit up screen. I loved these shows for the competition between companies and hearing their sales pitches.
Watching show starting with 1983 going from 84 to 85 its like night and day in what tech can do. Some 85 shows were on the 84 list I saw a real difference in capability.
And we’re still asking the same questions. Is this useful, or a solution in search of a problem? But, for only a few hundred bucks, you can save the time of taking your phone out of your pocket to see who’s texting you. And it reminds you to breathe!
16:40 "The whole development of LCD displays in Japan as far as I am concerned is aimed towards Plat panel televisions." This man was quite well informed of the state of the art in tech development. That means Japanese tech companies started aiming for FP tvs in the late 1970's. Which are now commonplace, 40+ years later, even transitioning to fourth generation Flat panel displays(Microled, Oled). First three being Plasma, TFT-LCD, IPS-LCD. There is of course the failed SED (Surface conduction Electron-emitter Display) from the Canon/Toshiba cooperation (started in 1986). Unfortunately it suffered from lawsuits making further development practivally impossible. It was definitively axed in 2010. But it would have been far superior to plasma, LCD, or any other plat panel technology at the time. Advanced prototypes demonstrated a true contrast ratio of at the very least 100.000 : 1 . A long exposure photo of a full black LCD, plasma, and SED revealed that SED had way way higher contrast than Plasma. LCD was washed out white. Plasma light grey, SED: Pitch black. You could hardly see there was a tv hanging there. They were all set for production when the litigations began. Production had to be delayed, delayed again, and ultimately they gave up.
I don’t think Paul Schindler was wrong, just very ahead. It’s rare to carry a laptop around but very common to carry a computer the same size as a pocket sewing kit.
@@SteveLeicht1 Watching movies like Back to the Future is a huge disappointment, because we don't have self-fitting and self-drying clothes, and NO HOVERBOARDS!
So much to comment on in this but one thing that really got me was when one of the sales guys tried assuring us that the response times on LCD displays were comparable to CRTs.. In 1985.. 20ish years before LCD displays truly started to catch up to CRT response times.
"Screen this large" "640 by 256 pixels" How do you think they would feel if someone told them that a neckbeard was watching this video 30 years later on a 28" 3840 x 2160 monitor?
@@GB-rf4fu Well perhaps it may be a item only for the rich. Meanwhile, we are getting close, at least with the pixels...... (7.68K by 4.32K) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-OKAU1Xx59ho.html
7:33 I choked on my coffee while watching this on my dual 24" 1920x1080 24bit color LCD displays, and glancing over at my teenage son's 55" color LCD TV. This was less than 30 years ago. Oh my....
@@kiningroseburg9288 Maybe not as drastic... We are approaching the limit of how small we can build transistors. The PHYSICAL limit, theorized at around 5nm. Unless we find a way to get around that, computers won't get faster
Ironically Paul's prediction was exactly backwards, while being somewhat correct. Briefcase style portable died the way of the dinosaur, we certainly didn't see more past 1985 but portability was improved because of that.
23:45 Lol, "there's still going to be a raging argument about what's portable when we're all 6 feet under ground", I just looked this guy up, and he's still alive (not even all that old), and I'm pretty sure I've never heard that argument raging.
LCD's sucked so bad. LCD is the kind of tech that introduced far more problems than it solved. They look great now though, after many years of refinement. I'm still amazed at how far the TN panel LCD has come, that tech was invented right along with the LCD itself back in the late 60's.
Back them, not one person shown in this video could ever foresee the availability of smartphones (which are now essentially miniaturised computers) that are far more powerful than the fastest computer depicted here.
I was interested in portable computers during the 1980s and the 1990s, but they were either too bulky or too expensive at the time for me. I did enjoy watching this episode of The Computer Chronicles in 1985 and I still enjoy watching it again nowadays as well.
@5:50 Looks like this was the basis for the story arc of the drama TV show "Halt and Catch Fire" about getting that Japanese company to provide them with LCD screens for the portable PC they were designing. @6:26 and components mounted on both sides of the circuit board.
IT is not only about computers - it's also about writing by hand on paiper - since paper information... is also information and needs to be managed - to much focus on one techbranche is bad - mixing them inefficient is even worse. writing a note is still part of IT / ICT - since some scribbles are very valuable..
The definition of IT is "the application of computers to store, retrieve transmit and manipulate data" it has nothing to do with whether something is important or not.
