Terminal Madness – 1980 Personal Computer Documentary

I stumbled across this gem of a video yesterday and thought it worth sharing – a 1980 documentary from Madison, Wisconsin, about the then-new personal computer scene. The video is a little dry in some regards but it proves to be oddly perfect in its predictions for computers in the future – as a kid at the beginning puts it, they would be as common as the color TV. They sure are common, with most people at this stage owning 2 or 3 devices that could be considered “computers” in their own rights, not to mention the myriad of embedded systems we use day in, day out.

I’ve always loved these glimpses into the very early days of computers, and while much of my focus and research recently has been on the UK computer scene of the 1980’s, finding content like this, especailly in the form of one-off videos, is great, not just for blog content but equally just for curiosity sake. It’s amazing to see how alien these machines were to people back then, and oddly, considering how you interface with them, how alien they would be to someone today.

There is a charm to the early microcomputers that is lost in today’s world of smartphones and cloud computing. It was baby steps for people getting into machines, as you had to tell them what to do – these days it’s almost the other way around, the system instead seems to tell you what to do. In a way, that’s better, but I do feel it’s ruined what makes computers truly useful to the skilled user.

Enjoy this look back 37 years, into the early days of computing in the United States. The Commodore PET, the Apple 2, in the days before the IBM-PC and MS-DOS… yep, this is back in the pre-Microsoft era, an alien time for most any computer user of the past 25 to 30 years.

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