For 40 years these terms were synonymous with the Cold War and Communism. Although only Russia is still in existence, the legacy of the Cold War still casts a shadow on today’s political scene. But what exactly was the difference between the Soviet Union, Russia, and the Warsaw Pact? All three were intertwined throughout the Cold War, and remained so until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. To a greater or lesser extent, all three terms tend to be used interchangeably, but while all three were the key parts of what is sometimes referred to as the Eastern bloc of Communist countries, the terms are not interchangeable.
The Star Wars prequel trilogy introduced us to the Old Republic, the political system of the galaxy before the rise of the Empire. Unfortunately, there is no getting around the fact that the Old Republic was a political system with many problems, some of them so glaring as to be deeply troubling to live under. From electing barely teenage Queens to term limited office, to no concept of legal double jeopardy, here are 9 reasons why the Old Republic kind of...sucked to live in.
The Supreme Court has come back into focus recently as it has handed down some major decisions and had one prominent member announce his resignation just this past month. What does this mean? Why are 9 individuals in black robes so politically polarizing? How does the Supreme Court work and who gets to sit on it?
Over the 69 years of the Soviet Union's existence, eight men officially stood at the apex of its political system. Arising from the brutal and sometimes murderous intrigues of Soviet politics, they led the Communist superpower as dictators until death or a coup removed them from their position. But who were these men, whose terms in power ranged from decades to only a few weeks? What was their official position called?
The 1980s was an era of major rivalries amongst a wide array of personal computer companies, fighting for control of the market. Even the leader that initially emerged from the fray as the undisputed winner was only able to enjoy its victory for a handful of years before going into irreversible decline and today, although still in existence, is no longer in the business of making personal computers. That company was IBM and its rise and fall in the PC market is the subject of today’s video. Few companies have entered a market with such expectations, and even fewer initially met or exceeded them so much. But IBM’s triumph was to be short lived.
Did you know that the first Kaiser of a united Germany was crowned in the Hall of Mirrors at the famous French landmark, the Palace of Versailles? How did this happen? The answer is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. As one of the few major post-Napoleonic wars of the 19th century, the Franco Prussian war was unique in how it affected the future of Europe. This conflict is usually forgotten in the shadows of World War 1 and the American Civil War, but it played a major role in creating the pressures that eventually led to World War 1.
The Star Wars prequel trilogy introduced us to the Old Republic, the political system of the galaxy before the rise of the Empire. Unfortunately, there is no getting around the fact that the Old Republic was a political system with many problems, some of them so glaring as to be deeply troubling to live under. From electing barely teenage Queens to term limited office, to no concept of legal double jeopardy, here are 9 reasons why the Old Republic kind of...sucked to live in.
The Supreme Court has come back into focus recently as it has handed down some major decisions and had one prominent member announce his resignation just this past month. What does this mean? Why are 9 individuals in black robes so politically polarizing? How does the Supreme Court work and who gets to sit on it?
Over the 69 years of the Soviet Union's existence, eight men officially stood at the apex of its political system. Arising from the brutal and sometimes murderous intrigues of Soviet politics, they led the Communist superpower as dictators until death or a coup removed them from their position. But who were these men, whose terms in power ranged from decades to only a few weeks? What was their official position called?
Did you know that the first Kaiser of a united Germany was crowned in the Hall of Mirrors at the famous French landmark, the Palace of Versailles? How did this happen? The answer is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. As one of the few major post-Napoleonic wars of the 19th century, the Franco Prussian war was unique in how it affected the future of Europe. This conflict is usually forgotten in the shadows of World War 1 and the American Civil War, but it played a major role in creating the pressures that eventually led to World War 1.
2018 saw yet another big budget take on the legendary English outlaw, Robin Hood. This particular version is mostly noteworthy for painfully crashing and burning at the box office for reasons both many and varied. The film is indeed rife with problems, including in its historical details. In today's video we are going to look at the top ten painful anachronisms that we noticed in it. Were the historical inaccuracies the reason why Robin Hood failed? Undoubtedly not, but since this channel is run by nitpicking history nerds... ;) Interestingly, Adobe Premiere gave no end of trouble editing this, with multiple crashes and such pronounced instability that it had to be reinstalled, which unfortunately did not fully fix the issue. So apparently even software doesn't want anything to do with this film.
In this second installment of the Rise and Fall of the IBM PC series, we will be taking a look at the rise of the IBM Compatible clone market and how it seized control of the IBM PC standard away from IBM itself, relegating IBM to just another PC manufacturer. We cover events up to IBM's decision to release OS/2 and the PS/2 line of computers, which is where the next part will pick up. I would be remiss if I did not mention the enormous help that Jeff Duntemann (a man who went head to head with Bill Gates in programming and is an expert on legacy computing) was in helping me understand just what the BIOS did on legacy PCs and how it interacted with the OS and the hardware. He was kind enough to respond to not only answer my questions regarding the BIOS, but also gave me a massive amount of useful information, some of which will be appearing in future planned videos.
Have you ever heard of a Yak 3, a Ilyushin Il-2, or a Polikarpov I-16? The air war on the eastern front in World War 2 doesn't get nearly the press that other sectors of the conflict receive. Yet the Soviets had a large air force and made major advances in airplane design throughout the war, eventually reaching parity with the Luftwaffe. This video is a brief overview of the major Soviet planes from the start of the war through the end, together with some comparisons with their German counterparts.
Steve Jobs was an enormously influential figure in the history of personal computing, not only as a founder of Apple computer, but also as the man who significantly changed the way we experience computing, music, communications, and media. But in between introducing the Macintosh in 1984 and the iMac in 1998, Jobs went through an interesting but rarely covered period in life where he was essentially fired from Apple and started a new computer company called NeXT. His goal was to repeat his success with the Macintosh and bring to market an entirely new platform that would go as far beyond the Macintosh as the Macintosh had gone beyond the IBM PCs.
Most people are unaware that Apple has its own relational database that dates back to the 1980s and today is up to version 18 and is used by tens of thousands of people world wide, with over 24 million total copies delivered since its inception. The version of FileMaker we are unboxing today is FileMaker Pro 2.1, which was released as a small update to FileMaker Pro 2(1992) in 1993. This version of FileMaker Pro 2 came still sealed in its original box, and we will be doing a full unboxing, review, and demonstration of it. The demonstration Macintosh is a PowerBook G3 "Lombard" with a 400 mhz PowerPC processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 4 GB hard drive.
2018 saw yet another big budget take on the legendary English outlaw, Robin Hood. This particular version is mostly noteworthy for painfully crashing and burning at the box office for reasons both many and varied. The film is indeed rife with problems, including in its historical details. In today's video we are going to look at the top ten painful anachronisms that we noticed in it. Were the historical inaccuracies the reason why Robin Hood failed? Undoubtedly not, but since this channel is run by nitpicking history nerds... ;) Interestingly, Adobe Premiere gave no end of trouble editing this, with multiple crashes and such pronounced instability that it had to be reinstalled, which unfortunately did not fully fix the issue. So apparently even software doesn't want anything to do with this film...
In 1983 the US home game console market collapsed, contracting around 93 percent and putting dozens of major companies out of business. The conventional wisdom was that the home game console market was finished, and would never rise again. But a century old Japanese company that was originally founded to manufacture and sell playing cards thought otherwise. Their name was Nintendo and their successful reinvigorating of the US game console market with the 1985 American release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is a fascinating tale of shrewd business practices, a willingness to defy expectations, and a company that wasn't afraid to try new things.
The story of how North Korea forced a kidnapped director to make what was essentially a Godzilla film, even including basically kidnapping the team that made Godzilla's special effects to work on the film, starts back in 1978. In 1978, Kim Jong-Il, the designated successor to the dictator of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, was overseeing North Korea's film production. Wishing to improve the quality of the films his directors and actors were producing, he decided to kidnap one of the South Korea's most famous directors, Shin Sang-ok, along with one of South Korea's most famous actresses, Choi Eun-hee (Shin's ex-wife), and force them to make movies in North Korea. They were trapped in North Korea for seven years before managing to escape by fleeing to the American embassy in Vienna, narrowly escaping their North Korean guards. But before they were able to escape, they created one of the most famous pieces of cinema ever to come from North Korea.
In this closing episode we take a look at IBM's two pronged assault on the clone market with the launch of the the OS/2 operating system and PS/2 line of computers. Success with OS/2 would ensure that Microsoft no longer controlled the dominant operating system while success with the PS/2 line of computers would ensure that those pesky cloners would no longer be a thorn in IBM's side. But could IBM successfully develop a new operating system that would supersede MS-DOS while also creating a successful new hardware standard that was totally incompatible with existing IBM computers AND uncloneable?
The War of 1812 (June 1812-February 1815) saw a deeply divided United States fight with Great Britain just 29 years after the end of the Revolutionary War. This conflict was fought in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars that were raging across Europe, and this frequently results in it being overlooked. However the War of 1812 was deeply impactful for the United States, which was still a very young nation, and was the first indicator to the world that the former 13 colonies were growing into a powerful new nation.
In 1979 a small company released the world's first "killer app" for the then tiny personal computer market. VisiCalc was like nothing that had been seen before, the very first spreadsheet for personal computers. People bought a computer just to get VisiCalc and its sales skyrocketed, even after multiple price increases. Exclusively available on the Apple II for the first year on the market, its powerful sales made Apple Computer a front runner in the personal computer wars of the 1980s. And then, after over a million copies had been sold across multiple computer platforms...VisiCalc faded from the computer scene and was ignominiously discontinued in 1985, after being bought out by the very company whose flagship product had killed it.
20 years ago the options for affordable, professional quality 3D modeling/animation software were very limited. Blender was still early in its career (and wouldn't go open source until October of 2002) and was fiendishly difficult to use and lacked a number of professional features. Learning professional 3D was and is difficult, but in 2001 the barriers to entry were considerably higher than today, with professional 3D software packages retailing for thousands of dollars and good, systematic training being far harder to come by. There was definitely a need in the indie and fanfilm market for a powerful 3D modeling/animation piece of software that was affordable, had top quality training taught by an industry veteran, and used the same software that the professionals used. The 3D Toolkit from dvgarage attempted to fill this need, giving its users acess to an an almost full version of a slightly older version of the veteran 3D software Electric Image Universe for anywhere from 80-90%
Microsoft Windows has attained near ubiquity in the computing world today, running on an estimated 3 out of every 4 computers. It decisively won the operating systems battle that raged across the 1980s and early 1990s, and has no significant competitors today, with its greatest rival on the desktop, Apple, having only a 16% market share. Yet Windows did not win the operating system battle overnight, and its victory was far from assured. It struggled just to get its first release, and spent years facing formidable competition. Few people would have bet on Windows to eventually win, but that is just what eventually happened. This series will (eventually) explore Windows rise to dominance, starting from its origins all the way to its last big gamble, Windows 8.
The post World War 2 era saw a large geopolitical realignment as the Iron Curtain descended and the first phase of the Cold War began. The United States and the Soviet Union raced to replace the increasingly obsolete planes that had fought in WW2 with new fighters and bombers that leveraged the best technologies of the day. In the skies over Korea, these new fighters and bombers would be pitted against each other in the first major military action since the end of WW2. In this video we take a quick look at the major fighters and bombers deployed in Korea on both sides.
In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union and a number of allied countries embarked on a bold attempt to significantly increase their computer technology and catch up to the west, via an ambitious effort to produce a clone of the popular IBM S/360 line of mainframes. The result of this program was the RYAD line of Soviet mainframes, a whole family of computers that were a significant leap forward for Soviet computing, and a program whose story is a fascinating one both for the ways in which it succeeded as well as the ways in which it fell short.
This is a shameless promo for our Substack
The heavy fighters of WW2 were a unique set of aircraft ranging from the unique turret based design of the Defiant to the turbo charged power of the P-38. Made as an unique concept in the interwar period, did the heavy fighters live up to their potential?
The Orzel was a Polish submarine that escaped the 1939 Nazi Germany invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War Two. Her journey began in Poland and took her to Estonia, where she and her crew escaped being interned by the Estonians at the behest of the Nazis. After her escape, she sailed through the Baltic Sea, dodging German air and naval forces, and fled to the United Kingdom. After a refitting, she continued her fight against the Nazis off the coast of Norway, where she almost uncovered the Nazis' invasion of Norway before it even began.
IBM had unknowingly created a juggernaut when they allowed Bill Gates and Microsoft to control the PC operating system standard, first with DOS and then with Windows. Having lost control of the PC hardware standard, IBM was determined to regain control of the operating system standard. Their weapon? The OS/2 operating system, a powerful and feature packed operating system that best case should have had little trouble overcoming Windows, and worst case should have at least been able to carve out a profitable and sustainable market share. This is the story of how IBM's last attempt to keep a measure of control in the PC space...failed.
Excel is practically synonymous with the word "spreadsheet" today, and has attained near ubiquity in the workplace and home. But it wasn't always the reigning champion of the spreadsheet market. In fact, Excel started out as a Macintosh exclusive, with Gates and Microsoft hoping that Excel could build a commanding position on the Macintosh, and then use that as a foothold to attack the dominant spreadsheet champion of the 1980s, Lotus 1-2-3. The Macintosh was in dire need of a killer app that could do for it, what VisiCalc had done for the Apple II years prior. But could Excel be that app? This is the story of how the world's most dominant spreadsheet was developed for the flailing Macintosh, a computer with a fraction of the market share of the then standard MS-DOS PC, from which humble position Excel began its long climb to total dominance.
2023 was an incredible year for the channel, and we are deeply grateful to all of you for watching, sharing, liking, and commenting on the videos. Your feedback on what you liked as well as what we could improve, has been invaluable. In this video we briefly review the channel's growth, as well as discuss our plans and goals for 2024, what our main bottlenecks in production are, and what videos are currently in the pipeline.
After many delays and becoming the butt of many industry jokes, Windows 1 had finally staggered onto the market at the end of 1985. It was met by basically complete indifference, as it performed poorly on most people's computers, and lacked any sort of compelling software to kickstart adoption and thereby drive more interest from software developers and users alike. But Microsoft pressed on with the followup, Windows 2. Although most of Microsoft's time and attention was focused on their partnership with IBM to develop a shiny new operating system, OS/2, and in spite of the fact that Steve Ballmer and others inside of Microsoft saw no point in continuing to develop the successor to the original Windows release, Bill Gates refused to call a halt to its development. Windows 2's story is a complex one, and IBM, OS/2, and OS/2's GUI Presentation Manager weave in and out of it at various points, together with Apple, HP, Compaq, and others. It's development was also further complicated