Loved this show as a kid. The annoying thing about now is, because of the format of the show, they only get to spend a couple minutes on each demo. I would be fine watching a whole half hour of the latest piece of hardware or newest application.
One great thing about the show was that it covered more than Windows and DOS, the most exciting episodes to me were the ones that showed UNIX workstations
Lots of people forget that until quite recently computing was an extremely diverse environment. Everything from home computing to mainframes had dozens of manufacturers, mostly incompatible not only with each other, but even between their own computers! Dozens of OSs, CPU architectures, graphics, and so on were everywhere.
Today's computing is pretty boring by comparison. It used to take work to keep up to date with what was going on just in consumer PCs, it seemed like an entirely new system architecture was being announced every few months. In the 80s and early 90s, specialized work for various business cases often even required entirely custom hardware. The average computer just wasn't versatile enough to cover all of the use-cases.
CC, by trying to cover a broad swatch of computing, inevitably spent lots of time in these interesting areas, even if they seem kind of niche these days.
Really fascinating is that their interview and showcase desk often features "titans" of industry like Jack Tramiel demoing something alongside a small company's disheveled software engineer. Even more interesting is how the industry has completely transformed such that the ratio of suited sales guys that used to be everywhere in the public face of computing like CC are mostly gone, and replaced by those same engineers.
Comments
Loved this show as a kid. The annoying thing about now is, because of the format of the show, they only get to spend a couple minutes on each demo. I would be fine watching a whole half hour of the latest piece of hardware or newest application.
One great thing about the show was that it covered more than Windows and DOS, the most exciting episodes to me were the ones that showed UNIX workstations
Lots of people forget that until quite recently computing was an extremely diverse environment. Everything from home computing to mainframes had dozens of manufacturers, mostly incompatible not only with each other, but even between their own computers! Dozens of OSs, CPU architectures, graphics, and so on were everywhere.
Today's computing is pretty boring by comparison. It used to take work to keep up to date with what was going on just in consumer PCs, it seemed like an entirely new system architecture was being announced every few months. In the 80s and early 90s, specialized work for various business cases often even required entirely custom hardware. The average computer just wasn't versatile enough to cover all of the use-cases.
CC, by trying to cover a broad swatch of computing, inevitably spent lots of time in these interesting areas, even if they seem kind of niche these days.
Really fascinating is that their interview and showcase desk often features "titans" of industry like Jack Tramiel demoing something alongside a small company's disheveled software engineer. Even more interesting is how the industry has completely transformed such that the ratio of suited sales guys that used to be everywhere in the public face of computing like CC are mostly gone, and replaced by those same engineers.