Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
From Periscope Films, a video preservation group that rescues niche short subjects from destruction and obscurity to be enjoyed by all. Many of their videos are of old army training videos or newsreels or the like, but there’s a deeper variety of subject there, waiting to be found. And one of them was a cartoon fro 1982, to introduce kids to the idea of microcomputers.
A microcomputer is an old name for small (compared to mainframes, and desktop-size minicomputers) computing devices made for home use in the 70s and 80s. You still see it once in a while, but it’s given way to just the term “computer,” especially since even some gigantic information companies mostly use clusters of consumer-class PCs, or else pay Amazon to use simulated computing power of that type. The word “microcomputer” was most often applied to machines like the Apple II, the Commodore PET or the like.
In this cartoon (17m), Jennifer is a girl living on a farm and has a gigantic chunk of microcomputer sitting on her desk, and introduces its use to her technologically-clueless visiting city cousin Jack.
It’s amazingly cringey, and perfect to show to friends and acquaintances, both students of what the Subgeniuses call badfilm, and more normal types who have been suitably psychologically altered.
In addition to Jennifer helping Jack learn how to use a computer that has 64K of RAM, tops, they also use it to catch a bank robber, by trapping her in their completely automated dairy barn (that contains no cows).
