1981
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Meet your desktop's ancestors: AT&T exhumes footage of the Bell Blit (video)
AT&T's video archives are rich seams of juicy historical tidbits, and today's offering is a fine example. It's sharing footage of the Bell Blit, a graphic interface that Bell Labs developed after being inspired by the Xerox Alto. Originally named the Jerq, it was created by Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi to have the same usability as the Alto, but with "the processing power of a 1981 computer." Watch, as the narrator marvels at being able to use multiple windows at once, playing Asteroids while his debugging software runs in the background on that futuristic green-and-black display. The next time we get annoyed that Crysis isn't running as fast as you'd like it to, just remember how bad the geeks of yesteryear had it.
Video: Activision, circa 1981
It was a wonderful time for America and an even more wonderful time for video games, which would, in a few years, emerge as the most important thing ever. But, back in 1981, Activision, a young scrapper in a booming industry who would one day become champion of the video game world (after defeating Apollo Creed, of course), created a now-hilarious video as a means to market the company and its products -- and that's probably the best part of this little spiel: the products. Peppered throughout the video are brief commercials for some of the company's games, including Kaboom!, Stampede and Ice Hockey -- ads very different from how Activision would market something like, say, Call of Duty: Black Ops, today. Man, remember when you could just go and call a game Ice Hockey? The times, they've done changed! [Note: Embedding has been disabled, so you'll have to head on over to YouTube to watch the video.]
"The world's biggest backyard fence to talk over"
MacTV has posted a really interesting videocast 'flashback' on the early days of computing in 1981 (iTMS link), including news footage and computing expo coverage. An intriguing but brief interview with "multi-millionaire Steve Jobs" made it into the vidcast, and barring any discussions of how ruthless his Steveness may be, he exhibited the same kind of well-spoken zest for computing in 1981 that he still has on stage today. At the least, it's a short but fun glimpse at what all this computer stuff was like 25 years ago. If you haven't subscribed to the MacTV vidcast (or the iPod edition) yet, this is a great time to start. They consistently post interesting video bits like this both new and old, covering topics you typically won't see elsewhere.
