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how can you choose from a palette of 16 million colours !!??!!!!! sixteen million colours ??

how come some programs don’t work on beebem or b em ?? or even xroar even ??? thanks

chris serle looks funny here !!

what is c lab or sky lab from the usa does any one know ?? thanks

21:56 where is the vatican

I can see the Gotham Gazette front-page headline now; "Harley hampered! New heroes stop amusement mile madness."

why can’t we list machine language programs ?? we are only able to list basic programs why though ?? thanks

who came up with this stupid idea of a heavy monitor? The heaviest. It lies on a delicate floppy disk drive. This is supposed to emphasize that Apple 2 is like an IBM PC. But it is enough to place both floppy disk drives next to the computer itself and put just the monitor on it. But that also makes no sense. everything should be separate and not pressurize other devices and their sensitive electronics

Reading this from a Apple IPhone in 2025

Playboy collection database

Yep we are living in the Matrix! Now where that lady in the red dress?

Hi from 2024 Mac gone to the Cloud storage in the sky. Watching on a smartphone..

I'm glad I found this, it was recorded the same year I left Glasgow University with a degree in computing. It was both a blast from the past and a pleasure reacquainting myself with this TV program, hearing and watching the comforting soft-spoken Chris Serle and amiable enthusiastic boffin Ian McNaught Davis aka Mac, sadly both of whom are no longer with us. A lot of water has flown under the bridge since it was first broadcast. A reminder of how so much of the world has changed over those more than 4 decades, a world now in so many ways that no longer exists it is almost as if I watching ghosts from my past.

Someone spoke to me with this accent and Elder Scrolls 3 flashback happened. I have to check this out. God bless you!

RIP, Sir.

So calm and so slow paced. Thats it. It was a great time. Never will be again.

RIP Chris Serle

Ooh, continuity error from 19:05 to 19:10. Something cut out?

RIP Chris Serle.

R.I.P. Chris Serle. He was in so many program's i watched as a youth. Him and other people like Ian McNaught-Davis. In The Adventure Game.

I remember, I wanted a Spectrum for Xmas but my parents decided on the Acorn Electron. The Spectrum games looked so much cooler but the educational aspect of the cheaper version of the Electron, the cheaper version of the BBC Micro appealed more to my parents if not to me! I remember in computer studies someone brought in a leaflet advertising the "Speccy" and we were all gobsmacked..... Colour AND sound at a price that wasn't too ridiculous. The BBC model B was a great machine though. The 2 programmes I did for my O Level were an animated image of a piston engine plus a telephone number directory. I remember writing dozens and dozens of lines of code just for the simplest of actions that would probably be done in just one or two instructions today. RIP Chris.

RIP Chris 😢

I am enjoying this, thank you!

im sorry, but you Brits are so bloody cringy at times, esp these classic tech reports.

He booked his flight on the internet, in 1982! Amazing!

22:28 Doctor Who incidental music

"It's IN the computer???" - Zoolander

Incase anyone wondering what computer program was broadcast at the end was then I'll think you will be disappointed 😊. It was just a message about the forthcoming live programme and how to submit a question, asking if you would be happy to be called on the phone (presumably to ask your question live on air) or would like to be in the audience. I loaded this into my original 40 year old BBC B computer I had back in the day.

Wow that's a big cottage!

"Limited by your own imagination". Hmmm, not quite.

Ian Trackman always reminds me of Malvin in Wargames!

22:22 Hitler!!!!

Since when did the BBC Micro have a screen resolution of 1200 x 1000!

You really wonder if Post Office/BT was paying Mac to keep banging on about Prestel. Did he really think the office of the future was still going to be using Prestel? That no other companies would come up with their own rival services? As a kid I remember getting a bit fed up with the amount they fawned over it - that and the bloody BBC Micro.

I love Mac's view of the office of the future, but only a tiny bit in the future, of just having terminals connected to the mainframe. Even though PCs had just come onto the market he didn't seem to think that everyone would have their own powerful computer on their own desk.

That Prestel adapter for the German system isn't translating some characters properly, shown fractions instead of the correct characters :)

I love Mac's dismissive nature that America can't be doing anything about computers in education. Absolutely no self-awareness that he may just have not put in very good keywords.

If the computer doesn't know anything about tic-tac-toe, why does it stop when Chris wins?

RIP Ian Trackman.

The irony now is that you'd need thousands of CRAYs to match even a single modern smartphone, tablet or laptop/desktop computer. Incredible power we have now and the kids most likely don't even realise.

I love watching these old computer programmes. RIP Ian McNaught-Davis, a great presenter and very smart guy. BTW they are available in somewhat better quality on the BBC computer literacy project website.

Gill Nevill, should you be watching these comments in 2024, please let me know if you are available, and if we can hook-up in either the UK or the New York region of the US. 😍

I have a serious case of the 'hots' for Miss Gill Nevill. I wonder if she ever looks at theses comments.

what they really showed at the start, was just how far computer animation had improved in the 2-3 years since the Tron animations were made.

9:09 taken from Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 1977

8:00 MIDI interface before the MIDI standard

unfortunately for the knitting ladies, only a few years after this show was made, the fad of the knitting machine was over and by the end of the 80s they were all but forgotten. Hope they came out on top, because it's quite common for startups that are built on a fad to end up with massive debt

one thing about this show, and the Computer Programme before it, is that they often talk about databases, but they never really tell you what a database is. Of course, what they show is really the simplest form of database with a single table of data, which already pushed the limits of what you could do with early 80s micro-computers

5 MP images in 1983? That wasn't really possible on anything but the insanely expensive systems made for TV. As for his memory model - Commodore, Atari, and many others kept the Basic interpreter and the character sets in ROM to not waste the precious RAM, and you only ever had to copy those bits to RAM if you wanted to modify it. Since the processors back then were so incredibly slow, it really didn't make any noticeable difference whether it was stored one way or another, but the tiny amount of available RAM was also why the game and program cartridges often included their own RAM in order to have enough to actually function as intended "Machine code", aka assembler, is really not that difficult to learn - and once you know assembler it's much easier to learn the bigger languages like Fortran, C, and Pascal, since it follows the same structure, where learning Basic can actually be a hindrance for learning other languages properly because it uses very different syntax. The hard part about assembler is that it has to be written specifically for the system it has to run on and you've got no variable names, so you need to know exactly where in memory everything is stored, which in turns means you need to know exactly how the machine organizes and addresses memory, since every time you want to do anything you have to specify specific memory addresses. This is the part that makes assembler difficult to use, which is also why nowadays it's only really used for the OS loader and the lowest part of the OS kernel, because writing full programs in assembler for systems with several GB of memory is extremely challenging

apart from Basic being effectively a dead language in any form other than VBA, much of what he said about proper programming practice still applies. Only thing he left out is "comment your damn code!". It's the absolute worst taking over from someone else, when none of the code is commented, and their way of doing things is different from how you'd do it - which is especially true for old programs - and then have to try to make sense of it