The History of Technology as Told in Wacky British Path Newsreels
In an inventive, generous act, British Path has uploaded its entire collection of 85,000 pieces of footage from vintage newsreels to YouTube. If you stop by to check it out, you might have trouble pulling yourself away. It's a fascinating survey of what happened to the world from 1896-1976, told in bite-sized chunks. The collection is searchable, so I pulled up some choice bits relating to computersespecially how they got used to automate practically everything in the 1960s. This stuff was amazing at the timeespecially, it seems, if you were a British newsreel announcer. 1949 An engineer teaches a machine to play noughts and crosses, better known to you and me as tic-tac-toe, 1962 Pan Am and IBM sign a deal to computerize airplane reservations watching this, it hit me how the heck did they do them before computers?, 1966 Rowland Emett, the Rube Goldberg of the U.K. demonstrates his homemade computer, 1967 During an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease, horse-racing fans settle for a computerized simulation, 1967 The latest in automationfrom the Auto-Typist to a pocket-sized dictation machinegets demonstrated at the Business Efficiency Exhibition, 1968 Honeywell demonstrates its "girl robot," Miss Honeywell, who, I regret to say, I suspect of being an elaborate hoax, 1968 A report on the Univac-powered Tinder of its day, complete with a Beatles soundtrack, 1968 A Putney man composes music with his home computer, which happens to be a PDP-8 minicomputer, One thing I learned from watching all of these Unless British Path sweetened its soundtracks, computers used to be noisy. I'm just as glad we no longer have to listen to that incessant clackety, clackety, clackety, clacking.