1985 Pop-up Book: Inside the Personal Computer | Ashens

I was walking past a charity shop and I spotted in the window a pop-up book called inside the personal computer and illustrated introduction in three dimensions also a pop-up guide so it's a pop-up book about old 80's computers I bought it so fast I fractured time and space so yes and this is indeed an exciting pop-up book about really bloody old computers and look how the text has been justified at an angle what isn't to love about this already a disappointingly it doesn't give the name of the author all the year it was made fortunately it has an international standard book number so I just looked that up and apparently it was written by Sharon Gallagher in December 1985 so there we go I've got to say though the technology inside it seems a little bit old for 1985 to me maybe it took a while to write maybe my memories just horribly broken and I never did actually spend three years living on the moon who cares we've got a bloody cool pop-up book to look at and we can learn about old computers at the same time or maybe we'll just look at the pretties yeah probably the latter so what happens when you first open it up hmm my goodness an entire computer grows in front of your face and by computer I mean cardboard facsimile but hey that's good enough so yeah look at that let's have a spin ting ting Dede look it's even got a scuzzy ports on the back and stuff and weird red wires one for the keyboard one for the power one assumes looking at the power socket I wonder if this is an American book that was republished by penguin hmm that might mean it didn't come out here till 1987 or later wow that was interesting anyway let's see what we can do is the best pop-up books give you a little bit of action stuff to do as well and this is no exception let's learn about a computer computers are smart yep that's going quite Americans well actually enough to play games help teach students and solve difficult problems that would take a person hours or even years to solve but inside computers are really quite simple minded just like us only with more bits of dirt still how many years that's been there scary I am saying a keyboard central processing unit the monitor software Excel we know let's have a look at the cool thing so the somewhat been doing on the screen so we've got the keyboard here you can play about art with the disk lock look can we read can we get this to an angle where this will work probably not yeah can't really hang on we basically says at the top now that I can make it out through the viewfinder at all insert but I can barely see at all this lie actually insert disk and closed door and then that changes to hello I can't read this at all through the viewfinder isn't that fun and hello this book explains what I am and how I work by the end you'll know me inside out plus you can look remove the little older 5 inch floppy disk those were the days when discs were flat and tats were potatoes now probably remember that wrongly anyway that's a basic computer family shows out something else cool how about a keyboard input computers to their thinking in a special language made up of electrical impulses no pulses the machines code only has two elements on and off and the third element nectar in which is unable to be used by humankind and causes the destruction of the universe okay I may have made that bit up so here's a nice brief explanation of the binary system there's even a little decimal to binary converter you can rotate and change look so one is 1 0 is 0 and 17 is 1 0 0 0 1 a that's quite nice nothing now isn't it teachers the kids while making things spin there's a little thing about ASCII code down the bottom once heard somebody perhaps that is ASC 2 which was quite impressive since it stands for American Standard Code for information interchange and the N it just tells you the ASCII code and the character and the binary equivalent again that's quite a nice little thing memorize all that and you'll have a very basic understanding of the letter M you lucky oh and here's a switch which I presume shows you on and off so doesn't do anything that one's broken I presume this goes off some happening ah that one's broken then let's have a look at the nice keyboard at the top and so the only Deary is we can press the M key or the M key is dirt no let's just pull this in two hands OOP oh yeah pull that the M key do is down and it shows you on this little bar here whoop the binary code that's happened eh it's all pretty basic stuff but I tell you what the very basics don't change much over the years do they obviously they're still based on you know ons and offs and stuff like that oh my goodness it's a box a box of chips but not the good kind you can eat and feel ill afterwards this is unfortunately just the insides of a computer it's got RAM random access memory CPU the central processing unit and ROM the space night if you look inside the computer you'll see a printed circuit board containing rows of plastic cases connected by conductor tracks this is true and look there's some sort of chip on the insulin opens up and tells you about electronic logic oh absolutely lovely I believe electronic logic extends to kill all humans and that's about only what's on the back of this absolutely nothing really glad I turned it in this little pocket is a stripey thing oh I remember this look you can fit your own chip wait for it here's my micro chip and I keep dropping it and there we are let's put it in and there like that and man this is awkward yeah there we are you are now a micro electronic engineer please connect to your degree on the way out of the room right let's pop that back in here and pretend we never put it in in case something goes wrong that's quite nice innit showing you all the basic bits oh hang on blimey flying discs we've kind of already done that one but here we are there is just a disc drive on its own here oh ah Cantona say I can't enough right if we pull that down you get to see how the inside of the disc works there the old electromagnetic heads and stuff like that and then you get to pull the disc in and out or the top of its open which would really upset a teacher that inner skill and here you can pull this red thing Oh we'll just shows you the inside the disk that's the bit you don't stick your fingers on because it's all electromagnetic and that so yeah I think the concept here is external memory because sometimes you have to take data away from the computer and put it into another computer or indeed there isn't anywhere to store it on the computer itself because hard drives are the stuff of AM admins dreams apparently hard disks can store between five and fifty megabytes of information the equivalent of between three thousand thirty thousand typewritten pages Wow hard disk was still between five and fifty megabytes of information imagine when this book was written how expensive a 50 megabyte hard drive would have been it been like at least twelve pence maybe even 14 had been insane right floppy disks what objects I'm gonna be honest not quite as exciting as some of the other pages that one quite like the box that came up not so sure about the other bits go on then hang on floppy disk care this should be good the information stored in a disk can be lost if the magnetic surface of the disk is damaged when handling a disk you must be careful not to bend it or touch the exposed portions Moisture extreme temperatures and small children covered in Jam connect also ribbon discs you should keep backup copies of all important this and blah blah artists list if you ever wondered incidentally why old disks used to be spelled with a k it's not a weird affectation it's because the disk the D is C portion is inside and the sort of plastic casing that it doesn't come out of unless you break it is called a diskette D is ke TT e so disk with a K is short for diskette and there we are now we've go over here under one whose hair that is how old is that hair for only a head Mon DNA testing lab then I probably wouldn't have anywhere else in my house to live because they take up loads of room is my understanding anyway next page Oh screams micro this is the inside of the old cathode ray tube monitor computers would be useless if they didn't have a way of communicating their results so monitors use semaphore no show the use of what the computer is doing like an ordinary television set to the screen consists of a cathode ray tube or CRT well not anymore we all kind of gone in LCD and OLED and all that these days haven't we just cast my mind back to when LCD monitors were quite new when the refresh rate was terrible and you try and play games on them and it felt like watching a weird blurry slideshow from hell but anyway nobody has a cathode ray tube television anymore because they're massive and they're heavy and they're really bloody expensive as compared to and well nothing good by one thing these days you have to go secondhand with you which reminds me I must get Trinitron for old retro game consoles ah how we relevant to this book was that right let's pull this thing what happens string moves across this one's a bit broken but kind of shows you the beam from the cathode ray there writing the word micro backwards that was fun wasn't it down here there's not much going on there's a big blank area for drawing your own notes right oh here we are this shows you things that could possibly be shown on a screen by a computer number one games this game being weird space shuttle simulator the front row with no straight number five great graphics yep that's what we call a bar chart or graph or dull next up a screen full of text you can't read yet phone number those as database management apparently spreadsheets which again is kind of text you can read and finally word processing which really is the Hat on text you can't quite read here thanks for that right well last page wasn't doing this it's a printer oh my goodness serial and parallel interfaces computers can send electrical character codes to printers in serial or parallel form that is entirely true although kind of massively outdated so yeah the printer was an exciting thing at the time look this computer can now make things physically real under this day but that's when the other page isn't bloody hell no excitement Apple this now that we've met I'm ready to work and play with you and zoom in a bit mmm now that we've met I'm ready to work and play with you see you soon good bye did it did that looked at dead looks got your look prints head as well but it literally but did it that's my impression of a dog matrix printer noise thanks thanks for coming out ah just remember Daisy wheel printers I'm not gonna mention them because they still give me headaches and people still like to see their work the way they did before computers on paper and carved under stone tablets when the printer receives an electrical codes from the computer it simply converts each string in the code into the corresponding letter or number and types the red character the result is called hardcopy hmm plotters and some printers can even reproduce computer graphics on paper but as more and more people obtain access to computers a new kind of paperless communication becomes possible instead of exchanging printed information people can network or link their computers together over telephone lines Wow a little bit of absolutely correct prediction of the future there but is rare for any of these 80s books hmm Eric hardcopy my god there's a hard copy of that plain Sandra because apparently everybody matey's office has called Sandra um plotters plot if you've never seen a plotted an amazing thing to watch they were like well they probably still exist for certain applications a row of pens and little mechanical hand and hand he come across grabbed a pin and draw lines so it was useless for um well it's things like certain types of text and small detail but if you're doing sort of vectored lines in that but absolutely amazing we had one at school and we're never allowed to use it because it was too expensive zoom out a bit there that's better operating systems which ones do they list absolutely nothing and it just lists of an operating system is actually a thing well there's a bloody hell this may explain plotters and there's one down here to get computer graphics off the screen onto paper you can use a plotter the plotter has a mechanical arm and a set of colored pens first the arm picks up one of the colored pens then yeah I think we've kind of guessed how that works and Daisy wheel printers oh god they're actually mentioning them I thought they were kind of out of date maybe five days II we love letter quality printers are slower than dot measurement is because these fully formed metal or plastic characters like a typewriter they produce cleaner type yep and is really good unless you want to print something that isn't exact letters in an exact size which point it becomes utterly fricking useless and finally modems and networks with the help of a modem your computer can link up and communicate with other computers all over the world the modem translates the computers language of ons and offs into tones of different frequencies that are then transmitted across telephone lines Hiram's the dial-up connection noise at the receiving end the process is reversed a modem converts tone variations back into the computers digital code computer networks are systems of computers linked together in this way they are used to send and receive electronic mail and to allow small personal computers access to the vast data libraries of larger computers and also to insult people's mothers when a child has lost a game on Xbox Live fantastic it's still did you know there's something a little bit magical that proper book isn't there you open up big cube big square things things sticking up close it goes all flat again so there we are that is inside the personal computer and I think I paid probably far too much for it after seeing an Amazon but I got excited when I saw it because I thought it would make an interesting video and now we know absolutely everything there is to know about really outdated computers except most things

Channel: ashens

Views: 525,234

Rating: 4.9479895 out of 5

Keywords: po up book, pop-up, book, ashens, review, funny, old computer, micro, computer, pc, 1985, retro, stuart ashen, retro gaming, modem, crt, ascii

Id: EWYweAUikis

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 10 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/itsaride]

That was surprising and rather excellent.

[u/beewalsh97]

That outro is my reason for living. I love it. That is also a very spiffing pop up book.

[u/megaminxwin]

16:9 wasn't really a thing in the 80s, but the intro and ending are in 16:9. Immersion ruined.

(no but seriously good video)

[u/RichB93]

I actually own this book. I'll have to see if its still around somewhere.

[u/scrochum]

so which is it stuart? did you spot it at a charity shop or did you pay too much for it after seeing it on amazon
im on to your wiles mr. so called ashen

[u/[deleted]]

I was going to complain about the lack of this, but it popped up at the end.

[u/DrDagless]

Loved this, it made a nice change from the usual stuff.

My rating: 9 Pat Sharp's out of 10.

[u/psrogue]

I thought popup books couldn't get cooler than that Hulk book. This was amazing! Especially those removable floppies.

[u/VentCo]

God I love the '80s Ashens into and outro.