The 80s in 8-Bits: The Home Computer Revolution
As previously mentioned, I was thrilled to have been invited to talk at Au Contraire, even if on a different topic to the one they originally asked me to do. I was offered a one hour speaking slot, which at first seemed a long time to fill. I aimed for 45 minutes, giving some time for questions, interjections and dithering. Over the week and a half before the day I prepared my presentation. It soon became clear that keeping within one hour would mean failing to cover a lot of material I really wanted to cover. Nonetheless, I persevered and eventually (read "early hour of the morning before the event") has something that seemed to work. Sadly none of the multimedia slides would work outside of my desktop machine, so I had to do it task-switching between the slides and a media player.
I thought the talk went well. I covered most of the things I really wanted to cover and the audience seemed engaged and interested throughout. When I finished I got a good round of applause which was pleasing. I did run a little too long, though I note that my audio recording was just under one hour. I had to hurry the last few slides, and skipped a few of the videos to keep it under time.
Attached here is a PDF of the slides as presented, and a copy of the audio. The audio quality is terrible, so if anyone thinks they can improve it for me, get in touch and I'll send you the original file.
Download Presentation
Download Audio
Links to media used in the presentation:
- Altair 8800b Fool On The Hill
- Apple 1 Replica Plays Chess
- TV Program Bits & Bytes
- Atari 800 - Ballblazer
- Sinclair ZX81 - 3D Monster Maze
- Commodore 64 Advertisement*
- Apple IIc Movie Star*
- Apple Macintosh - Big Brother Advertisement*
- Apple Macintosh - The Computer for the Rest of Us*
- Amiga Bouncing Ball Demo
- Hey Hey 16K*
* These videos were skipped during the Au Contraire talk.
- 16184 reads
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Post Office Computer Crashes
I don't suppose a chap named Mark Conner was in the room at the time?
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lizardb0y
my 1st exp
happened to be punching and loading punch cards into the reader @ the post office (now NZpost) , back in the day.
managed to jam it, and cause the system (IBM as/400 if i remember correctly) to crash.. been tinkering around with computers ever since (hopefully i have gotten better :)
Re: Mummmblety mumble
Yes, it's a bit rubbish really. Next time (hopefully there is one) I'll make sure I have a proper lapel mic rather than an MP3 player clipped to my t-shirt.
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lizardb0y
Cell phone?
I've had reasonable success using the voice recorder function on my cellphone. Leastways it was suprising what levels the Mic picked up when left in a room (and crucially NOT attached/carried on the person). As usual YMMV.
Mummmblety mumble
I regret that I had to give up listening to the audio as provided. It sounded like a jacket (?) was rubbing against the Mic meaning I had to turn the audio down .... which then meant I couldn't hear your dulcet tones. It's a shame since the material covered looked interesting even if the revolutionary BBC required at least 30 mins by itself :P
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