Ever glance upon your parents with a touch of frustration as they struggle to operate your brand new, shiny holographic smartphone? Exasperated you show them that it responds to your dulcet tones by cooing to it and asking it to unlock. Unfortunately, not all of our parents can adapt to the leaps and bounds technology has taken over the past two decades and a new webseries called Computer Show highlights this by juxtaposing the 80s era with 2015 in a series of videos about emerging websites and startups.
The plot of the show is quite simple in its design: The show and its hosts are from the past, and the guests are from the present. Don’t ask why, just enjoy it for all its mirth. As Computer Show illustrates, explaining the modern role of computers is pretty difficult for someone who isn’t familiar with the concept of the Internet itself (Something that is quite young in the grand scheme of things as my father says).
The creators behind the Computer Show is Los Angeles based Sandwich Video, a company that makes commercial videos for well-known tech start ups such as QuizUp, JawBone and GroupOn. As a result, the guests on the show are invariably people behind said start ups. The first episode of the show features Lumi cofounders Jesse Genet and Stephan Ango who, through great trial and effort, explain the basis of Lumi to the hosts of the Computer Show. Who are these hosts? The main host of the Computer Show is Gary Fabert, played by actor Rob Baedeker. Some of the best moments in the show come when Fabert pretends to understand acronyms such as “URL”, “HTTP” and then miserably fails in doing so. I admit, I lost it when he referred to the iPhone as a “little calculator”. The co-host changes on a per-episode basis.
The entire show is chock full of stereotypical 80s era video editing, with 8 bit music, a 4:3 aspect ratio and all in great 360p resolution.
“Is there a Reddit community for Michael Jackson?” “Yes, yeah, absolutely, King of Pop… he has quite a career… in the future”
You can watch Computer Show at http://computer.show/
