Originally published at: This 1970 educational film about computers has a great retro vibe | Boing Boing
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I’ve heard that the new Siemens System 4004 can computate the location of the three remaining golden tickets:
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Describing computers as counting machines kinda misses the point of computers. ENIAC was a counting machine. Turing was working on a much higher level at the same time, considering a computer to be a symbol manipulator.
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My dad worked for the wonderfully named Sumlock Comptometer; a marvel of electro-mechanical technology.
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Wow, that thing looks like it could cave in Cathy Bates’ skull quite easily.
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Fascinating. I didn’t know that back in the day only men had the skill of counting.
Anyone else notice that the beginning music, (about 34 seconds in) sounds a lot like the noises R2 makes. That can’t be a coincidence, right?
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I was thinking they should have hired Dick Hyman to do the soundtrack.
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If you think those computers are clunky, you should see what a credit card creator from those days looked like. I used to run one for Lechmere Sales in Cambridge, MA.
I remember learning to draw it from the World Book Encyclopedia my parents were conned into buying in 1977 or so. I hand drew those OCR letters everywhere.
Even this film reminds me of Saturdays at the public library, where educational films were shown. It’s a pang of nostalgia, and also a pang of regret that 2020 isn’t as far as we had hoped, mainly due to conservatives just, well, being conservative and fucking things up. Gods, I hated Reagan.
Apologies for being all maudlin and whatnot. But that’s what memories do to us.
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Not as such; it’s just that women weren’t invented yet.
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That is true, but a lot of people still think they don’t count and that calculators belong in the kitchen.
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Too true…
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