Today's flashback is a promotional film for Remington-Rand's pioneering UNIVAC computer. The film is from from about 1952 and is from the collection of the Computer History Museum (website, YouTube channel) in Mountain View, California.

I particularly enjoyed the exasperated reaction by the female clerk at 1:35 into the video as the man brings her more work to file away. Good thing computers have completely changed that and no one ever gets frustrated handling company data any more!

The video is 17:31 in length. Enjoy this fascinating look back at computer history.

Twenty-two years ago, I bought the only computer I've ever loved. It was a whirlwind romance, and it began, as many affairs do, with a quick glance across a crowded room. A brand-new Macintosh Plus was sitting on a small desk in a computer shop called Computer Contact in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. It was a beautiful spring day in central Michigan, with the sun shining and the birds singing. Our eyes met and I casually strolled across the sales floor to introduce myself.

When I first met Mac, it had a golf game running on its nine-inch monochrome screen. This was remarkable because the only golf games I'd played on my Kaypro II computer worked like this:

You are 175 yards from the hole. What club do you want to use?
> 4i
The ball travels 163 yards. You are in the fairway.
You are 12 yards from the hole. What club do you want to use?

And so on. Almost as exciting as watching golf on television, actually. The game on the Macintosh wasn't text-based, though. It featured a real-looking golfer jauntily waiting to tee off. I'd never seen anything like this. I'd played video games in arcades, of course, and on my Atari 2600 at home, but this was nothing like the blocky sprites that passed for humans in many of those games. This was revolutionary.

Now I realize the original Mac came out two years earlier, and while I certainly remember the famous "1984" Super Bowl ad, it didn't actually show the computer. The ad's imagery and message were cool, but what could Apple be introducing that would justify that ad? With IBM PCs and Apple IIs as my only comparison, how different could this "Macintosh" possibly be? It didn't help that sales of the original Mac and its 512K successor weren't exactly stellar. So Macintosh had been under my radar... until I saw the golfer on my new love's monitor.

Looking closer, I saw the mouse. I'd never seen a computer mouse, but it seemed fairly natural to hold the soap bar shaped object and move it around a bit. Pointing at the menus across the top of the screen, I watched as each one "dropped down" to display several choices. I quit the golf game and began exploring the rest of what I soon learned was the Mac's "desktop."

I found MacWrite and MacPaint. The affair was all but consummated at that point. Remember block commands in WordStar? I still have painful memories about block commands. They resurface every time I go looking for a missing HTML end tag.

I wanted this computer. I needed this computer. I loved this computer.

The shop also had a 512K Mac nearby, and I was almost swayed by its lower price tag. The store owner assured me, though, that the Plus was the one I wanted because it had one megabyte of RAM: "enough to last me pretty much forever." I don't blame Bob for being wildly wrong with that prediction, after all, most PCs had only 64K of memory at that point.

$2600 later, the Plus came home with me, along with a $600 ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer. I've never enjoyed taking anything out of a box more. Now I had my own Macintosh that I could play with endlessly. Or at least when it wasn't loading and saving files onto its single 800K floppy drive.

A month later, having had enough of "floppy swapping," I bought my Mac's first peripheral: a second 800K floppy drive. That made life much easier, and made the next major event possible in our ongoing relationship: Mac and I went pro.

The manufacturing company my wife Doreen and I were working for needed a price list for a product line they were taking on from a sister company in Florida. The decision to move manufacturing to Michigan had been made on short notice, so they needed the materials right away. Doreen was in charge of the company's marketing materials, so she called the printing company Delfield worked with to find out how quickly they could turn the job around. They weren't able to promise anything faster than six weeks, due to the time requirements of traditional typesetting and design. Doreen asked me if I could put something together with the Macintosh. I said yes and started laying out the price list in MacDraw. A few days later, I took a floppy disk with the file on it to another computer store in Midland where they had an Apple LaserWriter - très exotique! The quality of the output was excellent, 300 dpi, and while the commercial printer's layout department had to cut in the logos and a few photos, the brochure was done only three weeks after the initial request. They also saved some money in having me do the work, so soon there were more layout projects coming my way.

I bought Aldus PageMaker 1.0 and Adobe Illustrator 88 and continued to improve my skills in the infant field of desktop publishing. When I was making more from my moonlighting than I was as a draftsman at Delfield, I quit and started my own freelance business, which I've now been doing for 20 years.

I couldn't have done it without my Mac Plus. Oh, I've owned plenty of other computers, including a Mac LC (my first color computer), a Mac Performa series, and several Windows-based computers. But my Mac Plus was the one that changed my life. It doesn't work very well any more - its monitor only displays the top half of the desktop - but I still have it, and one of these days I'll have to take some time to see if I can repair it. It's the least I can do for an old friend.

Any other early Mac owners? Let me know about your Mac love in the comments!

Sometime in mid-1993, CBC Primetime News reporter Bill Cameron did a fairly detailed six-minute report on "Internet," the then-new collection of independent computer networks that were connecting people all over the world. As anchor Peter Mansbridge notes in his intro to the piece, if you had a computer and a phone (and about $200.00 a year), you could be part of "Internet" in your rec room.

The piece actually holds up well. Cameron's comments are a bit hyperventilated at times, but when you consider how new the whole concept was in 1993, they're justifiable. The interesting thing to me is the strong sense of detachment I had watching this ancient (as Internet time is reckoned) video; these people look like me, they sound like me, but I'm not really like them anymore, because of how pervasive the Internet (somewhere along the line we added the definite article to "Internet" and kept it) is in most people's lives today. We don't think about it anymore than we do the radio in our car, the television in our living room, or the water coming out of our taps. The Internet is an essential utility.

The short segment explaining emoticons made me laugh a bit. :D  Emoticons have taken a lot of grief over the years, but they're still a quick and effective way of getting the intent of an email phrase or IM comment across. Cameron's summary of "Internet" as "pure, clear, free, unregulated communication" also seems like a phrase from a distant, more innocent era, though the various governments (including Canada and the U.S.) that have attempted to regulate the Internet, and continue to do so, were already working on restrictions by the time the piece aired on CBC in 1993.

Although the piece doesn't have a specific date mentioned, Cameron talks about the release of information from an Ontario murder trial against a court order, so it's likely summer or fall 1993. The prosecution and trials of serial killers Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo had begun that summer, and information about them was restricted by a publication ban issued by an Ontario court. Bill Cameron died in 2005 after fighting cancer for a year. Peter Mansbridge is still the anchor of CBC's evening news program The National, a post he's held for 20 years.

UPDATE: This clip is also on the CBC's website, and the airdate is identified as October 8, 1993.

In late 2006, when the fuss over lonelygirl15's real identity and the fact that her YouTube videos had been scripted was at its peak, I had a sense of deja vu. I remembered The Spot.

Wired ran a cover story on actress Jessica Rose and lonelygirl15 co-creators Mesh Flinders and Miles Beckett, and writer Joshua Davis breathlessly described the cloak-and-dagger behind the scenes action that made lonelygirl15, in Davis' words, "a mashup of homemade video diary, soap opera, and mysterious, hint-laden narrative like Lost. It's all the more engrossing because viewers can correspond with the characters and even affect the plot."

Although YouTube didn't exist in 1995 and broadband connections were rare outside of the workplace, Flinders' "thrillingly uncharted creative landscape" had been tried before, and had produced the same reaction from the much smaller number of regular Internet users at that time. The Spot, or "Melrose-Place-On-The-Web," as Wired called it in June 1996, was produced by American Cybercast and was the first website to feature episodic fiction in the style later used by Flinders with lonelygirl15. It also had banner ad sponsors, which made the site a pioneer in online advertising, and won one of the original Webby Awards.

Without video, the site made clever use of photo galleries and online diaries to create interest in the lives of the Spotmates, a group of attractive young men and women in their early twenties. The Spotmates were portrayed "on camera" by models from the Los Angeles area, and their "diaries," which predated the term but were similar in tone to a personal blog, were written by creator Scott Zakaran and a team of writers. Fans ("Spotfans") were encouraged to comment on the diaries and give advice to the Spotmates, sometimes affecting the plot line with their suggestions.

I've never been much of a soap opera fan. When I was in college, the peak of the Luke and Laura wedding hysteria meant General Hospital was "destination television" for many girls in my dorm, as well as a lot of the guys (though they probably won't admit it now). But The Spot was fascinating to me, especially in the beginning when, like lonelygirl15, it wasn't clear whether it was real or not. Keep in mind that there weren't dozens of blogs coordinating to figure out the truth about The Spot in the way lonelygirl15 was finally outed in 2006, so individual web surfers were mostly left on their own to decide.

The conflicts between the Spotmates as they shifted alliances between each other, moved in and out of the house and dished the dirt on each other was enough to keep me coming back for more, but there was one "event" that happened at The Spot that was particularly memorable. While photos of the Spotmates on the beach had always been a big part of the appeal of the website, the legendary Spotmate Lingerie Party provided hours of clicking fun (especially on a dial-up connection). Sadly, I can find no leftover images from the site anymore other than the few archived on The Wayback Machine. They were tame compared to the terabytes of pr0n available on the web today, anyway, I suppose, which probably accounts for my nostalgia for The Spot and the Spotmates.

The Spot fizzled out in 1997 when American Cybercast went bankrupt, but at its peak it had over 100,000 hits a day, the equivalent of millions of hits today. The Spot was revived in 2004 for a couple years, but it wasn't the same. It was truly one of the defining moments of the early Internet for me, and I still remember it fondly. Anyone else have Spotmate memories?