Octo-Puce (Bits & Bytes) 1983
In response to 80s tag (sort of) I've uploaded here 5 minutes of Octo-Puce (Radio-Québec) french version of Bits & Bytes, TVOntario 1983.
I do like watching this, like a piece of history and a reflect of the good old days with the personal computers mania going on.
I'm saying in the introduction that it's not exactly my favorite tv program; it's simply because I've nearly no memory of this tv program, even if the theme music reminds me vaguely something. So, my guess is that I was probably watching something else at the same time, I was a young kid after all in 1983.
This video was taken from a VHS tape that was available for rent first at a video store. Years after, these VHS tapes nobody seems to want anymore are destroyed if nobody buys them. So, I've bought two of them and gave one to my older brother who seems to not remember it either.
I did try to capture to do a DVD of the 3 episodes from the VHS tape. Unfortunately, at that time, the only way to get this high quality was to record it without any compression, and the file size limit for a FAT32 partition is only 4Gigabytes, which gives between 5 and 10 minutes depending of the choosen video resolution. What you're watching here is a capture Ive done in year 2002 with a Pentium II computer with an ATI RADEON card and running Windows 98. After capturing the video, I did convert it during an entire night into MPEG-2 format with filters to de-interlace and clean the picture. It was a very long process just for 5 minutes or so, but what you're seeing here is probably the best quality you can get, even with today's computers.
I'm very happy with the result and the Youtube rendering here is satisfying.
In the intro, we can see a few things some of you may know like an animation called Apple-Vision (a computer animation with music of a silhouette dancing in a tv screen).
This episode is the introduction to tapes (sequential recording) and disks (indexed blocks recording) to save and load programs, later (not shown here) they use a database program for the Atari computer. As you can see, they are using here a Commodore PET computer.
I'm sorry but I can't give the full episode for two major reasons : 1- It's not my intention to publish the entire episode, specially considering it's supposed to be a Coleco related channel and there is no Coleco system; 2- I did sale my VHS tape to someone I know who will take care of it and even make his own DVD version of it.