in General, Libraries/Info Sci, Tech

Retro Computer News

CBC, a Canadian news channel and web site, has a large archive of old news video clips online. Two in particular made for interesting viewing on this lazy Sunday afternoon:

October, 1982: “Kids and their computers”
Kids begin to learn computer skills in school and elsewhere. How great that a public library was offering computer classes to pre-school kids that early! Heh, I just realized that when this story aired I was merely a few months old.

October, 1993: “A network called ‘Internet'”
It wasn’t even ‘The Internet’ yet, just ‘Internet’. In ’93, the world was just starting to take notice. CBC did a pretty good job of grasping some of the big issues the Internet would spawn later in life – permanence of information, social groups, irrelevance of distance, legal issues, etc. A lot more even-handed and accurate than network news reports of tech stories tend to be today.

I found the latter story via Digg.com, and browsing from there led me to the former. I’m finding lots of great links on Digg recently, and am working up a better method to distribute them than using tons of posts.