In these latter days of the 20th century, the format of choice for communicating with Americans is VCR, and if the computer industry knows anything, it knows formats. Today, software documentation, press releases, and memoirs of computer scientists are all making the move to video. The latest collection arrived just in time for the holidays. Here are the best of the lot.
The Dutch Boy's Finger: Edsgar Dijkstra in Concert. Rijksfilms, 90 min. The King of the Dutch Computer Science Insult Comics takes a few pokes at some well-chosen targets and a North Sea of laughs comes pouring in. Among the pokees: Americans (too anti-intellectual); IBM (too big); software engineering (the 20th-century mania for cooperation in everything); universities (their degeneration into graduate factories a threat to civilization); programming languages (Fortran is an infantile disorder, PL/I a fatal disease, Basic leaves students mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration, APL creates a new generation of coding bums, natural language programming is doomed to fail, and it's unscientific and a symptom of professional immaturity to call any of them languages at all); and John von Neumann (as the villain who introduced anthropomorphism into computer science). Based on his popular treatise, Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective, originally distributed in copier-paper format. R, strong language, adult themes.
Groupthink: Getting Ready for Groupware, CoLabVideo, 104 min. A collection of lectures, interviews, and case studies on the Groupthink model and its implementation. Michael Shrage and a group of Lotus groupware specialists discuss how all great discoveries are really collaborative efforts, a group of Apple Computer Area Associates examines the ways in which workgroup computing has helped Apple retain its technical edge, and, in an interview with a group of Newsweek reporters, Alvin Toffler explains how to detect and suppress individual thinking in groups. The second half of the video deals with legal and technical issues: A legal firm discusses the subtleties of the shrinkware group-license: If any of the group breaks the seal, is the entire group obligated by the terms and conditions of the contract? To its credit, the video frankly acknowledges some problems yet to be resolved in groupware; in one case study at a university function, a group of philosophy professors is shown failing to get anything to eat due to a nondeterminancy in the groupware algorithm. G, suitable for all viewers.
The Face Against the Glass. Loving Grace Cybernetics, 120 min. A challenging video, narrated by Mitch Kapor. Based on a short story by Franz Kafka, the video explores the consequences for human interface design of the fact that people are more adaptable than machines. Kafka himself wrote the best summation of the story: Leopards break into the temple and drink up the sacrificial wine; this is repeated over and over again; eventually it becomes predictable, and is incorporated into the ceremony. Many questions are left unresolved in this dark, troubling video: Is there any sequence of actions that will not come to seem to users the normal way to get a task accomplished, if they repeat it often enough? Is human interface design an art, a science, or religious ritual? NC-17, ritual acts, human sacrifice, desecration of icons.
The Apple/Claris HyperCard Announcement, Apple Computer Multimedia Lab, 38 min. A taut, white-knuckle suspense story with a Peckinpah-like burst of violence at the climax. After three years, Apple releases a new version of HyperCard. The tension is tangible, and the denouement is predictable when the company announces that the product, formerly bundled with all Macintoshes, will henceforth be a competitively-priced Claris product. A thriller. R, strong language, graphic violence.
A Tribute to Bill Gates, Microsoft Press Video Division, 3 min. All of Bill Gates's industry friends get together to express their appreciation and fondness for the great man. G, suitable for all viewers.
Our Best Marketing Secrets, Tandy/Radio Shack Videos, ?? min. This video could not be reviewed, as the copy received was blank.