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.

Louis Gray wrote a recap of the various incarnations of his LouisGray.com website, from personal site to sports comics site to his current blog where he discusses developments in technology under the subhead "Silicon Valley Blog."

It's interesting to see how Louis' online presence has changed as the available technology has changed. Also interesting how a connection with a well-known blogger, in this case Robert Scoble, made such a difference in the success of the blog as well as its eventual editorial direction. After Scoble linked to LouisGray.com, Louis was

...excited, but nervous too. For if I didn't start writing about stuff that Scoble wanted, he would unsubscribe. He wouldn't share my items in his link reader, and that'd be the end of that little experiment. Luckily, I started to arc my coverage even more toward tech, and more toward those things he liked, including Google Reader and RSS.

I suspect that many of us who've been online in one form or another have similar experiences, but I enjoyed reading Louis' trip down his virtual memory lane.

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.

Now anxiously awaiting the tenth U.S. president of his lifetime, Tom Kephart approaches each day with the grace of a panther and the caution of a small boy with a pointy stick. He's been writing about technology issues since his first review of his grandparents' eight-year-old Admiral model P17D21 television. Something about "rich black and white tones of the Captain Kangaroo show;" alas, the rest is lost to posterity.

With a curiosity about people and things limited only by an unfortunate fear of riding on buses, Tom has traveled to several of the United States in search of adventure. Someday he hopes to visit California.

Tom is married to his high school sweetheart. He has one adult child and one still hoping to make it to adulthood. A dog and a cat round out the all-American family.

He has been a freelance writer, graphic designer and programmer for over 21 years, but that's only three in doggie years.

He sings for beer in karaoke bars in his spare time, and also directs and acts in community theater productions.

Though Tom loves the outstanding benefits of being a freelancer, he is as attracted to shiny piles of money as the next guy. If you're looking for a writer, contact him, provided you have shiny piles of money. Actually, dingy piles of money are okay, too.

Tom's also available for your next web design and development project, having labored over HTML code for over a decade, sometimes even remembering to close his tags properly. Experience with CSS, JavaScript, DOM, XML and other letter combinations adds to the fun when he's working on a project. He is an evangelist for open source content management system software, having had good experiences with Joomla!, Wordpress and his current favorite, Drupal. He's also available for bar mitzvahs and debutante balls, provided you want to hear a guy with a shaved head sing the blues. Who knows? You might.

After three decades of watching the tech world spin madly past and being a small part of it himself, Tom Kephart continues to be fascinated with the creative spirit of new technology. And, of course, vintage television receivers.