Uploaded January 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Based on the LP record "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Home Computers" (also hosted by Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows), Computability is a gentle introduction to the new world of home computers in the 1980s. The video was targeted towards the 50-and-over crowd, and its primary focus was trying to explain what home computers were good for and how you could benefit from purchasing one. It is a curious artifact from the very early days of personal computing, where it was necessary to produce instructional videos for complete and total beginners to even the word "computer".
It should be noted that the LP record, and this video produced a year later, were a few years behind the curve. These types of "what are these new-fangled computers good for, anyway?" instructionals, mostly in the form of books and magazines, were most popular roughly 3 years earlier when the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore Pet had been around for a few years.
Despite the age and style of the content, there are some surprisingly prescient use cases and scenarios covered in this video, such as connecting to online "data banks" (ie. early information services that predate the world wide web), and also controlling household lights and alarms -- concepts taken for granted 3 decades later.
Source: VHS, with additional post-processing for noise, levels, and motion-adaptive deinterlacing. Capture, processing, and encoding were all performed in a 10-bit workflow (not that you can tell from the video, the VHS tape was not the best quality).
More information on the original LP: itworld.com/article/2702372/application-management/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-home-computers---in-1983.html
A recording of the original material (from cassette): youtu.be/0FDxWh0wGII
Based on the LP record "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Home Computers" (also hosted by Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows), Computability is a gentle introduction to the new world of home computers in the 1980s. The video was targeted towards the 50-and-over crowd, and its primary focus was trying to explain what home computers were good for and how you could benefit from purchasing one. It is a curious artifact from the very early days of personal computing, where it was necessary to produce instructional videos for complete and total beginners to even the word "computer".
It should be noted that the LP record, and this video produced a year later, were a few years behind the curve. These types of "what are these new-fangled computers good for, anyway?" instructionals, mostly in the form of books and magazines, were most popular roughly 3 years earlier when the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore Pet had been around for a few years.
Despite the age and style of the content, there are some surprisingly prescient use cases and scenarios covered in this video, such as connecting to online "data banks" (ie. early information services that predate the world wide web), and also controlling household lights and alarms -- concepts taken for granted 3 decades later.
Source: VHS, with additional post-processing for noise, levels, and motion-adaptive deinterlacing. Capture, processing, and encoding were all performed in a 10-bit workflow (not that you can tell from the video, the VHS tape was not the best quality).
More information on the original LP: itworld.com/article/2702372/application-management/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-home-computers---in-1983.html
A recording of the original material (from cassette): youtu.be/0FDxWh0wGII
