VHS-Beta-V2000
Remember the days when on a Saturday afternoon or a rainy winters evening, you’d take a trip to the local Video Rental Shop? No? Wow! Your really young or sadly suffering from malfunction of the brain.
Back in the 70’s, 80s and 90’s if you were lucky you had a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) a wondrous device that sat under your T.V. like a large cinder block with buttons. They came in a few different formats, Video 2000, Betamax and VHS the latter being the winner of the Videotape format war of the 70s & 80s.
These magical machines were the entrance to a world of action, horror, fantasy and numerous other genres, they brought laughter into your lounge or at least they did to our lounge.
Our local video rental places were totally cool, we were lucky to have a few small rental stores but we were also very lucky to have one of the largest and well stocked video stores I’ve ever seen with a guesstimated stock of around 10,000 movies it was amazing. A place to browse and find that cool old film you haven’t seen and a haven for me where I met some great friends and had some great conversations about movies.
As a result of these endless visits I gained a love of movies, some classics that have come to be known as the greatest movies ever made and some that just sat well with me and still do.
I can’t legally upload movies, well perhaps some that are out of copyright but it would be best to avoid doing that here on Neocities, so below linked are some old movies I like and some documentaries you might find interesting. All are link to YouTube who I don’t like but they have the feature for now to make my life and the design of this page easy.
Here you will find both movies and documentaries that I find interesting. Hope you enjoy them, I can’t promise they won’t disappear because they are hosted at YouTube, if I can find a distributed video site who both host and allow embedding then I will change the links.
Movies
Micro Men (2009)
Duration: 80 Min.
TMDB: LINK TO TMDBSynopsis: Dramatisation of the race for U.K. home computer supremacy in the 1980s, documenting the lengthy rivalry between Clive Sinclair (Died: 16/09/2021) (Alexander Armstrong) and Chris Curry (Martin Freeman).
Breaking the Code (1996)
Duration: 90 Min.
TMDB: LINK TO TMDBSynopsis: Film depicting the life of Alan Turing this was a made for T.V. but is a pretty good movie. Later this story was told under the names of Enigma and The Immitation Game. On a side note you should read up on a rather interesting character who rarely gets a mention in this story and that's a gent called Tommy Flowers who had quite a lot of involvement in this story. But then the tech's and engineers never do get the credit they are due.
I have been unable to embed the movie here due to the O/P not allowing playback from other websites. So you will have to watch it directly on YouTube.The Best of Men (2012)
Duration: 90 Min.
TMDB: LINK TO TMDBLudwig Guttmann, a renowned German neurosurgeon who fled Nazi Germany in the early days of WWII, takes a position at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, England in 1944 and begins to transform the lives of his patients, paralyzed soldiers that have been written-off and who are facing death from neglect. A breakthrough comes when Dr. Guttmann introduces sport into their rehabilitation, a breakthrough that leads to the founding of the Paralympic Games.
I have been unable to embed the movie here due to the O/P not allowing playback from other websites. So you will have to watch it directly on YouTube.The Curse of Steptoe (2008)
Duration: 67 Min.
TMDB: LINK TO TMDBIn the early 1960s aspiring stage actor Harry H. Corbett jumps at the chance to play junk-dealer Harold Steptoe in a television comedy show 'Steptoe and Son'. However, the show's success proves to be a poisoned chalice for him, type-casting him and thwarting his stage ambitions. Wilfrid Brambell, the actor playing his father, is marginalized in a different way. He is a gay man in an England where homosexuality is still illegal.
The Fifth Estate (2013)
Duration: 128 Min.
TMDB: LINK TO TMDBA look at the relationship between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his early supporter and eventual colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and how the website's growth and influence led to an irreparable rift between the two friends.
Eric & Ernie (2011)
Duration: 90 Min.
TMDB: LINK TO TMDBSingle drama telling the story of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise's formative years, from child stars to national treasures. 'Big head, short legs' is Eric Bartholomew's first impression of Ernie Wiseman, but their friendship endures and, encouraged by his well-meaning but determined mother Sadie, Eric became the funny man to Ernie's 'feed'. After a successful stint in children's variety, they work their way up the ladder of live performance, but after a disastrous television debut in the series Running Wild, Morecambe and Wise learn to trust their own instincts and just make people laugh.
I have been unable to embed the movie here due to the O/P not allowing playback from other websites. So you will have to watch it directly on YouTube.Documentaries
8 Bit Generation - The Commodore Wars
The Code: Story of Linux
Revolution OS
Tetris - From Russia with Love
Code-Breakers Bletchley Parks Lost Heroes
I have a real interest in code breaking cyphers, encryption and also the coldwar and I've decided to point you to some interesting places you can visit if you live in the UK
Adjust Your Tracking | The Untold Story of the VHS Collector (2013)
Gary Kildall Documentary (1995)
I am sure you have all heard of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and some of you may have heard of Steve Wozniak and while these men all have there place in computer history there is also another man who seems to have been long forgotten who in his own way pushed the computer revolution just as hard as Gates, Jobs and Woz. This short documentary will tell you about Gary Kildall, Digital Research, DR-DOS and GEM Desktop. You can also find out more about Gary and the sad ending to his life on Wikipedia.