If you will, The Computer Chronicles

Technology spearheaded by computers are providing many new innovations, practical applications and features that have revolutionary flavours resembling the industrial revolution of 19th century. To name a few, Artificial Intelligence, robotics replacing traditional labour, speech synthesis and recognition making phone call talks possible with a machine, 3D graphics competing with real life visions, virtually anything being designed by computer graphics applications, simulations substituting practical training, networking superseding individual offline computers, reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is beating CISC of x86 architecture CPUs, magnetic mass media being replaced by solid state drives, computers in education getting ubiquitous, and finally devices becoming so small that you can lose them like keys.

Does that all sound like state-of-art hi-tech in 2021? Well it shouldn't, since I'm talking about 1980's, and more specifically the topics and conversations gone through in The Computer Chronicles - a current affairs television series about computer related matters started in 1983. The series ran for almost 20 years till 2002, but since I'm watching it systematically from the beginning (or at least as systematically as I can get from YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerChroniclesYT - according to Wikipedia there is "only" almost all episodes, and sometimes the comments in episodes themselves seem to refer on episodes broadcast before that are still on the queue to come), I'm not be even close to 1990's yet.

I'll summarize the nature of the show. Essentially it's a documentary talk show, where in around 20+ minutes of real program time the hosts interview various visiting computer specialists, who also often have something to demo with on a computer brought to the studio. Sometimes there also are excursions to an external site (or at least some delivered remote footage shown in between), such as a computer factory or Xerox office showing laser printer functionality on a Xerox Alto computer with mouse and graphical user interface (yes, this is from where Steve Jobs and a few steps later Bill Gates stole their ideas for their Macintosh and Windows, correspondingly). Most of the stuff in the program is pretty much top tech of the time, much of it being still on prototype level and all of if is being rapidly developed at the time and in the years to come.

Skynet's time travel scheme is interfering the picture.

To me the series also works even as a sitcom; every now and then people are having predictions about computer future that go so badly wrong. Things like not seeing wide usage for optical media alongside floppy disks or anticipating that IBM PC compatibles will have no point in a long run. Since the series is over 35 years old, people debating about what role will some things have later on will naturally have brances that are nowhere close to what came to happen sometimes in just few years after. Retrospectively those "wrong" bets can be quite amusing in a good way, yet there are lots of people who have very acute perceptions about the states of fact.

One of the recurring co-hosts, Gary Kildall, is actually one person in the series who has several sharp insights on the way. I think this is to be expected too though, considering he was a person who in 1970's as one of the first people saw true potential of microprocessors as independent computers. He is best known for developing essentially the first non-device tied microcomputer operating system, CP/M, which also later on become the precursor of MS-DOS. I guess most computer users today don't remember even DOS, so I guess we're swimming quite deep here already. Killdall himself sadly died relatively young (52) in 1994, after various tragic events.

Obviously though it'd be unfair to judge people from failing to see the future, since they're simply making logical conclusions from the knowledge available at the time. There are always infinite amount of possible outcomes of tomorrow, so if someone in 1985 fails to foresee that there will be no more Soviet Union after ten years or that IBM has lost to PC clones, those people would not be to blame. In fact, had just some decisions been made differently at certain critical historical junctions, everything could be different also for today. That is why speculative fiction and scifi with time paradoxes have so much narrative potential, but now I'm digressing, as I willingly so often do.

For a contemporary viewer one might assume it has not so much to give - even if the actual topics could be made sound contemporary matters, everything in the show is of course de facto obsolete by today's standards. So is its value today just, if you will, retrocomputer enthusiast material? Not quite, not only that in my opinion. Of course it's history, but it is also some history which gives perspective for today.

History in general provides multiple points of views and I could talk of many, but we have just about a minute, let us just take one. Kids (including young adults) today sometimes joke that people in 1980's or before would be so badly dumbfounded by today's gadgets such as everyman's smartphones that they'd call for witch trials if a person from the future would bring such device to them. Again, not quite, I think, even with the hyberbole and intentional anachronism aside.

After all, for instance Dick Tracy had his call capable wrist watch already in 1940's and space exploration was a thing already in 1920's - ideas live for decades, sometimes even centuries before practical applications, so when someone actually gets some device functional, it practically always is already an old concept. Things like these are also always already considered about at the time when a science fiction representation is released. As an example I can remember an article from my childhood in MikroBitti (a Finnish computer magazine started in 1984) about Knight Rider. It was all about its scifi super car KITT and whether the technology used in it is anyhow plausible. Conclusion was that essentially everything in the series could theoretically be implemented - but that the car would be more like a truck than a sports car if all the features would have been genuinely implemented at the time.

This being said, much of the technology demonstrated in The Computer Chronicles is something which would not really be available for the general public at the time. Military helicopter simulators of early 1980's could run on a computer which has processing power comparable to a mid 1990's home computer (or, a personal computer - home computers usually refer to 8 and 16-bit hobbyist machines, while the term personal computers was typically referring to a more serious business capable computer). Artificial Intelligence as a concept was clear already back then, but only with today's seemingly infinite maximum memory and drastically grown processing speed it is becoming truely a capable tool. Similarly accurate speech recognition could be limited to one person's voice only at a set tone due to lack of processing power of the devices, even while as a concept it can be already made fully functional at least with expensive system. This pretty much goes with everything in the series - in comparison to 2020's much of the technology in 1980's is still either too primitive or even more often too expensive to be used in most imaginable situations. Yet I feel had this series been made today, they would have not put the emphasis similarly on actual facts and technical details - to me, this is emotionally rousing.

All this gathered, despite people decades ago would surely have been impressed by today's devices, I see no reason why essentially anything available today would be unimaginable for any reasonable being having lived during the past eighty years or so. They'd be more surprised to hear that people of same sex can get married, or that despite all the available knowledge so many people would rather believe in narcissist bigots than science. Ladies and gentlemen, we're out of time. Thank you for joining us with this episode of the Zacharian Computer Diary.

(Then in a moment I'm told that someone's parent would still see smartphones unimaginable today, that there are lots of people for whom the Earth is flat, trips to space let alone Moon were fake news, and someone living close to equator would take it as a lie to claim that elsewhere there are white winters during which it's possible to walk on water, oh well...)