It’s been a while since we’ve taken a look at a Computer Chronicles episode, so tonight I thought it might be fun to take a look at this 1992 episode on Word Perfect. Word Perfect was a very popular piece of word processing software in the 90’s and early 90’s, only relenting dominance of the […]
It’s been quite a while since we last looked at a Computer Chronicles episode, and I thought today would be a good day to rectify this. Today we’re going to take a look at an episode from 1991 involving file compression. Yes, exciting, I know. In all seriousness it is a somewhat interesting topic – […]
The early days of the computer revolution were an incredible time for people who happened to have the right combination of skills, money, and just plain luck – a successful combination for anyone, sure, but especially so in the computer revolution of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Well known examples of this are people […]
Speed. It’s the main thing we all want in computers, be it desktop machines, smartphones, even game consoles, it all boils down to speed. In the computer world, speed equals power, or so it would seem. While the reality is far more complex and nuanced, when it’s all said and done faster components are generally […]
Here we have a slightly different episode of The Computer Chronicles. While normally the show takes a look at the more personal end of the computer revolution – how individuals and small businesses use various machines, sometimes breaking into big business where it seems relevant, the show tends to not focus on the upper end […]
Today we take for granted just how Memory (in a sense, raw working space) systems are being shipped with, or how much is available to a custom machine builder. 8, 16, 32, even 64 gigabytes of RAM are easily available in most any system you could buy or build today. Just a decade ago, 4 […]
Computers first and foremost are tools to do work. Sometimes, you need to do work “on the go” and if your work involves a computer, you would need a computer that can be just as “on the go” as your work needs – a “portable computer.” Most of the computers in the world today are […]
We take for granted the fact that over the past 20+ years now we’ve been able to pretty much run whatever we want on our computer at whatever time we want – even at the same time. This seems normal to us, but it wasn’t always the case. In early computer systems, either as a […]
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 […]
I thought it fitting, given recent events, to share this episode of the Computer Chronicles discussing the Internet in 1993. I don’t have to explain the internet to you – you know what it is, but understanding how it became what it is and why it was such a major thing, that’s something else entirely. […]
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 […]
With the death of Flash coming in a few years, it only felt right to share (as I did in the previous article) this episode of the Computer Chronicles from 1998 discussing web plugins – after all, that’s how Flash got started, as a web browser plugin. Oh, those were the days. Granted to a […]
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 […]
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 […]