This is it – the final episode of the 1983 TV Ontario series “Bits and Bytes.” It’s been 11 episodes introducing the basic concepts of computer usage in 1983. This is an interesting one – it focuses on the future of computing, both logistically and practically. Things like people sitting for far too long at […]
Since their inception computers have been business tools, machines designed to assist their user in efficiently doing work. It’s not a foreign concept to most of us – we all certainly use computers in some form in our day to day lives, some of us more in-depth than others. While the same was true in […]
Ah, simulation software. Flight simulators, driving simulators, space simulators… you think of it, someone has probably coded a simulator for it. Hell, there’s even a joke name for a genre of game today called “walking simulator” where most of what you do is simply, well, walk. Computer simulations hold an interest to gamers in that […]
Let’s take a trip back. All the way back, in this case, to the original episode of “The Computer Chronicles” back in 1983. The idea behind the computer chronicles was to cover the then-new field of personal computers. Just what could you do with these little machines, and what was their future? These machines, some […]
Have you ever seen the movie “Office Space”? If you have, then you will certainly remember a certain antagonist in the film that wasn’t a human – it was a machine. In this case, the office Printer. They are funny things, really, the typical printer – it seems since their inception, people have had a […]
One set of early applications that the home computers of the early 80’s were exceptional at (given the primitive graphics available) were those that taught something. Known in this video as “computer aided instruction” this episode of Bits and Bytes focuses on some rather impressive instructional programs intended for children, spanning the various major home […]
When computers as we think of them today (microcomputers, as the terminology of the day would name them) were introduced, one of the most critical uses of them, and certainly the one most people took to the easiest, was typing out documents. Be it something for a business, a letter to a friend, writing the […]
Computers, explained in their most simplest form, perform tasks they are told to do – namely, calculations. Put enough calculations together, and you can do some interesting things. Telling the machine to do these various tasks one element at a time, though, would be an intense process. Instead, we use various programming languages to write […]
Getting to another episode of The Computer Chronicles today, we have Storage Devices – the way we save our data. Today, we use hard drives with sizes easily in the terrabyte ranges, or solid state drives that while at a somewhat lower capacity provide incredibly fast read and write speeds. Hell, my phone, a budget […]
I would imagine when most people think of “computer music” these days they still think of the beeps, boops, and blips of the Atari and early computer systems of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Even by 1983, however, music from computers had come quite a long way, and we were just on the verge […]
One thing that all computers do in some form is store data, be it programs we install on them, or data we generate ourselves using these programs. This is, of course, by design – computers are tools to help us do work (or at least, that’s why they are made, whether or not we use […]
Ah, programs. You’re using one right now, whether you realize it or not. Actually, you’re using several. Probably several dozen at once, and you don’t even know it. The browser you’re viewing this website with, that’s a program. The operating system your computer or mobile device is using is, guess what, a program. The extra […]
In this very early episode of the Computer Chronicles, we take a look at computer chip technology in 1983. 34 years ago 8 and 16 bit CPU’s were dominant, RAM was measured still in the Kilobytes, sometimes megabytes for larger systems, and CMOS was an “emerging technology.” Thousands of transistors on a chip the size […]