Tim Hunkin is a treasure. I have all the Secret Life episodes on dvd which I bought from his website. He'd evidently burned all the discs and posted the package himself, and of course his own artwork adorns the cases.
For anyone in or visiting the UK I recommend a visit to Southwold Pier where he was given free reign to put his stamp on the amusements and exhibits.
It's a real shame that the Ferranti Pegasus they show off as recently restored in this video has apparently been permanently retired, although it does still exist.
Oh yeah. I was pleased to see the old shows were remastered at high rez with Tim Hunkin's commentary at the end. Tim says the episode was filmed in 1991, wikipedia said it aired 1993. I just stumbled across this episode at random and decided it belonged here.
But today I saw a claim that since the programmer of Electric Pencil was a former film producer, he thought of editing words like he was editing a film. Words and letters were like a sequence of frames of film. Cut out these frames of film, paste them in somewhere else. These editing methods made the new word processors wildly popular with screenwriters.
Yes, my understanding is that Michael Shrayer had never even heard of "word processors"; he simply thought it logical that he ought to be able to use the computer he had built to write with.
The Wang word processor, which dominated the industry in the late 1970s, is a page-oriented system in which users can only view one page at a time. MultiMate, a Wang clone, emulates this. I think IBM Displaywriter (and thus IBM's Displaywrite software for computers) also uses this paradigm. I've not used Electric Pencil, so don't know how it handles pages, but if it doesn't have this restriction, I suppose that would be an example of ignorance being bliss.
That's really interesting. I grew up with WordStar and then MS Word so it never occurred to me to think about word processing before cut and paste, but I suppose it must have been a huge paradigm shift for the people who lived through it - probably comparable to the advent of spreadsheets and the way they revolutionised data processing. It sometimes feels like the tech bros of today with all their chat about disruption are desperately trying to replicate the massive changes that IT brought about in the 80s and 90s, but really it feels like every new technology since that era has been an incremental step by comparison.
NorthernPlastics@reddit
Tim Hunkin is a treasure. I have all the Secret Life episodes on dvd which I bought from his website. He'd evidently burned all the discs and posted the package himself, and of course his own artwork adorns the cases.
For anyone in or visiting the UK I recommend a visit to Southwold Pier where he was given free reign to put his stamp on the amusements and exhibits.
thunderbird32@reddit
It's a real shame that the Ferranti Pegasus they show off as recently restored in this video has apparently been permanently retired, although it does still exist.
Useful_Resolution888@reddit
LOVE Tim Hunkin. Every single Secret Life of Machines is essential viewing.
nmrk@reddit (OP)
Oh yeah. I was pleased to see the old shows were remastered at high rez with Tim Hunkin's commentary at the end. Tim says the episode was filmed in 1991, wikipedia said it aired 1993. I just stumbled across this episode at random and decided it belonged here.
TMWNN@reddit
Yes, my understanding is that Michael Shrayer had never even heard of "word processors"; he simply thought it logical that he ought to be able to use the computer he had built to write with.
The Wang word processor, which dominated the industry in the late 1970s, is a page-oriented system in which users can only view one page at a time. MultiMate, a Wang clone, emulates this. I think IBM Displaywriter (and thus IBM's Displaywrite software for computers) also uses this paradigm. I've not used Electric Pencil, so don't know how it handles pages, but if it doesn't have this restriction, I suppose that would be an example of ignorance being bliss.
Useful_Resolution888@reddit
That's really interesting. I grew up with WordStar and then MS Word so it never occurred to me to think about word processing before cut and paste, but I suppose it must have been a huge paradigm shift for the people who lived through it - probably comparable to the advent of spreadsheets and the way they revolutionised data processing. It sometimes feels like the tech bros of today with all their chat about disruption are desperately trying to replicate the massive changes that IT brought about in the 80s and 90s, but really it feels like every new technology since that era has been an incremental step by comparison.
poplop69@reddit
The silicon trophy was awesome. I remember watching this show as a young one and contributing to my fascination with disassembleing everything.