
The Computer Chronicles – Microchip Technology (1983) [video] - bane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYE4g9N4kCs
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LeoPanthera
The creator and presenter of Computer Chronicles, Stewart Cheifet, donated his
personal copy of every single episode of the show to the Internet Archive. It
was one of the first, if not the first, video content to be archived there.

[https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles](https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles)

And we must thank him for this, for it is an invaluable history of the rise of
information technology. It ran weekly from 1983 to 2002, documenting the
remarkable technological (and often social) change in that time.

Side note: It is remarkable that the first few years were co-presented by Gary
Kildall, creator of CP/M and founder of Digital Research. He had no presenting
experience at all, but still agreed to join the show to provide a more
technical perspective.

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IntelMiner
I wish the Archive would provide an easier way of getting their Chronicles
archive. They offer the show in a seemingly uncompressed MPEG-2 format,
roughly 2GB/episode.

Every file IN the archive is available as a Torrent file, which pulls from the
Archive's own mirrors as well as other users

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way of bulk-downloading the torrent
files for import. If you try to grab the Chronicles as a "collection" using
the "IA" downloader, it only offers the MPEG-2 version

I assume the IA downloader was designed for HTML and the like, it seems to be
capped at roughly 150KB/s on downloading. Which is fine for old websites. But
the Chronicles (after downloading for literally weeks) sits at a hefty 645GB!

If I were to re-encode it to H.265 and put it up as a single unified
"collection" torrent, would this be something others may be interested in
downloading? It would likely be around 100GB then (or possibly less)

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LeoPanthera
A few weeks ago I bulk downloaded every single MPEG-2 file and transcoded them
all into deinterlaced h264/aac files.

If anyone has any suggestions as to how to re-share these converted versions
in bulk, I'd be very happy to.

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IntelMiner
A torrent upload would probably be the easiest bet. That was my plan for an
H.265 version, though it'll take a few days to encode it all

~~~
LeoPanthera
Indeed, I rented a high-CPU DigitalOcean VPS to do it.

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apo
Many fond memories of watching these shows as a kid during the 80s on Channel
60.

