I wanted to share this with you all, hoping that you'd enjoy the trip down memory lane. I happened across my recordings of an educational program I watched, back in 1983, which contributed greatly to my interest in home computing. The program was called "Bits and Bytes" and aired on the educational channel TV Ontario (TVO). It starred two popular Canadian personalities, Billy Van and Luba Goy, and had the infamous Jim Butterfield as one of their consultants. It was an introduction to home computing and I get such pleasure out of watching this program from my youth. It really brings back so many good memories. Because of Bits and Bytes, I knew more about personal computers than my high-school teachers did.
Anyway, in this clip, Billy is asking about the possibility of some computer contacting his computer "in the middle of the night" and extracting confidential information from it. I just love the answer he gets as to why that was impossible, back in "the day". We just don't realize sometimes at how much more secure our good ol' C64s and 128s are, when compared to today's home PCs.
If you can't watch the stream in the player below, I've included a direct link to the MP4 if you wish to download it. It's only 6.6MB in size.
Very prophetic. These ghouls have their fingers in all pies these days. I exchanged thoughts often with Jim Butterfield when he was in Compuserve's CBMAPP forum in the mid-nineties. He was a great guy
Very prophetic. These ghouls have their fingers in all pies these days. I exchanged thoughts often with Jim Butterfield when he was in Compuserve's CBMAPP forum in the mid-nineties. He was a great guy
That's what I've been told by everyone who've had spoken or worked with Jim. Sounds like he was a very friendly and insightful person.
Yeah, with everything on-line these days, 24/7 and always accessible, it's Billy Van's worst case scenario. You're private information isn't even your own anymore to control. Your bank controls your credit info., your health care provider controls your medical info., etc. And you have no say as to how that information is used or who can see it.
Jim was the one who originally suggested to me that WsDos should include the ability to load and run programs saved from older Commodore computers, such as the Plus-4, the Vic-20, or the PET and CBM series. Otherwise I don't want to say anything political at this point other than to point out that we are living in a 2022 version of 1938 Nazi Germany.