BOOTLEG FILES 891: “Computability: How to Make the Most of Your Home Computer” (1984 educational home video starring Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube and Internet Archive.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: Only available on VHS.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Woefully outdated production with no reissue value.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Nope.
Forty years ago, many Americans were spending the holidays getting acquainted with a remarkable gift: their first home computer. But for those at the dawn of the digital age who only knew about computers from science-fiction films, the machines posed a complex challenge.
In 1983, comedian and talk show host Steve Allen teamed with his wife, actress Jayne Meadows, on a record album called “Everything You Wanted to Know About Home Computers,” which provided a pleasant introduction to how home computers work and how people can get these machines to work for them. The record, which was produced by Casablanca/Polygram Records, received a Grammy Award nomination and it inspired the creative talent involved to adapt the material into an educational video with an accompanying glossary.
Watching the 1984 video production “Computability: How to Make the Most of Your Home Computer” is a strange experience at multiple levels, not the least being a recognition of the primitive nature of the computers – with their small screens offering green text on a black background, they seem more like a problem instead of a solution. And for the painfully elementary tasks the computers can handle – such as keeping track of a personal budget, balancing a checkbook or maintaining a holiday card mailing list – the machines seem like a solution in search of a problem. (Considering the tasks being accomplished in this video, the production was clearly aimed at grown-ups and not those rascally youngsters who immediately took to computing.)
The video begins with an introduction from “Phillip the Computer,” sort of a low-rent cousin of the HAL 9000 with its condescending authoritative personality. Steve Allen appears to happily assure the viewers that the computers they will be learning about are not the “terrifying, complex, mathematical brains that can outthink a mere mortal, and at a dizzying speed.” Allen adds that computers can “make your life simpler or enhance it beyond your wildest dreams – but the key word is ‘simple.’”
Allen introduces the viewer to the concepts of hardware and software – brand new pop culture terms back in the Reagan era. “This computer is hardware,” says Allen before knocking his knuckles on its shell. “See how hard it is?” Yes, that’s the kind of humor that permeates the video – but Allen is so genial that the corny jokes are charming. He also offers explanations of what a floppy disk can do (remember those?) and the differences between RAM and ROM.
Jayne Meadows arrives after a few minutes – she’s a wee bit overdressed, if you don’t mind a catty observation. She introduces the concepts of bit and byte – did you know there were eight bits to a byte? There are also chips – “You wouldn’t want to eat these,” she warns – and she also defines a modem as “a device that changes the electronic impulses in a computer into sounds that can be carried over a telephone line.” (Yup, remember when you couldn’t use the phone because you were on the computer?)
Allen helpfully points out there are two different types of computers, the Apple and IBM machines, adding the software for one is incompatible with the other. (This video uses a Kaypro 2 machine for its demonstrations.) Allen and Meadows then sit down together to use the computer for housekeeping purposes, printing out their on-screen data on a daisy-wheel printer (remember those machines with their rat-a-tat-tat noise as the text was typed on paper?).
By contemporary standards, the most glaring weakness of these early machines was their inability to offer images. Allen makes a fleeting reference to Atari and Pac Man, but throughout this production nearly everything on the computer screen is text-based – crude bar graphs are the closest we come to seeing something that is not a letter or a number. Equally unnerving to today’s viewer is the absence of audio. One part of the video has Allen and Meadows learning Spanish from the computer, but Allen narrates the questions and answers on the screen – the viewer never hears the Spanish words being pronounced by the computer program.
Not surprisingly, “Computability: How to Make the Most of Your Home Computer” became antiquated as home computers quickly evolved into more sophisticated machinery. Of course, the video never gained a DVD re-release. Nonetheless, it is a user-friendly relic from the digital yesteryear that can be viewed in unauthorized uploads on YouTube and Internet Archive.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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