Over the past year I took some time to cover every episode of the 1983 Canadian TV series “Bits and Bytes.” This was a television program designed to give its viewers some insight into the then-new home computer scene, covering basic principles of computing, showing some things you can do with various computers of the …
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Bits And Bytes – Program 12: What Next?
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 …
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Bits And Bytes – Program 11: Computers At Work
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 …
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Bits And Bytes – Program 10: Computer Music
The computers of the 80’s are somewhat well known for the unique sounds they produced. While CD quality audio and digital sound samples are the order of the day now, and have been for several decades, in the early days of computers sounds, and thus, music, were produced via internal hardware that directly generated tones …
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Bits And Bytes – Program 9: Computer Graphics
Ah, now we’re getting into one of the more interesting nuances of the 80’s computer scene – graphics! While today our systems simply use software to create everything we see on screen, with hardware doing the raw math to make it all happen, back in those days, you didn’t have processing power, memory, or, well, …
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Bits And Bytes – Program 8: Games & Simulations
Wow, we haven’t taken a look at Bits and Bytes since July! Time to get back to it. Bits and Bytes episode 8 deals with Simulation software and games which have an educational lean to them. While being an episode dealing with games, it does touch into some elements of gaming back in the early …
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Update: The SNES Classic Will Be Sold In Quebec After All
News coming in from up north, apparently the SNES Classic Edition will be sold in Quebec after all. Toys R Us Canada and EB Games Canada twitter accounts made mention of this a few days ago, which is good news for everyone in Quebec who wanted to get the console locally. The bad news? Doesn’t …
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Bits and Bytes – Program 1: Getting Started
It’s time to head back to 1983, to a time when the PC as we know it was in its infancy, and the home computer market was still dominated by the likes of Commodore, Atari, Apple (pre Macintosh, mind you), and Tandy (at least, here in the North American market – it was a slightly …
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