The World of OCR (C. 1960) [video]
4 comments
·December 14, 2025HardwareLust
That channel has a ton of cool old films from IBM, Bell, NASA and others.
fortran77
“She’s a very attractive young lady, but why in the world are we watching her?”
b112
Amusing comparative to today's mores.
What always strikes me these days, is how old film is now. This "attractive young lady" is likely in her 80s or 90s, if she's still among us. EG, let's take 2025 vs 1965 + 25 years.
There was a time when paintings were the best we knew of the past. Then blurry photos, but we're now over 100 years of motion pictures. Our ancestors had no capacity to see the past, as we have.
I do my best to not blame the past, for most in it were simply ensconced in the culture and mores of the time. And it makes me think that quite surely, many things we do today will be seen as quaint, or improper 100 years from now. Certainly our descendants will think us uncouth, and over things we imagine as proper today. Things we think of as "doing the right thing", will be seen as uncouth, horrible, perhaps vile to our descendants.
Take this out of context statement about the young lady (the context being "the era of the 60s"). Back in the day, women expected such complements. They also expected doors to be opened for them. Chairs pulled out. For a man to stand whenever a woman was to be seated.
In this film, the gentleman says "why are we looking at this woman", yet also felt obliged to couple that with a conditional "she's attractive", for it could be misconstrued as "OMG, why am I looking at this hag!". Societal politeness dictated he do so. He would be doing the young lady a disservice, and seen as impolite by his peers did he not. And further, she'd expect it as her due.
I find today that often people take so many things out of context, from the past. Judge without knowing the circumstances (not saying the parent is judging here). We should understand context, culture, history, before pointing I think.
The most interesting part of this video to me is the editing. It feels like someone just watched Breathless by Goddard and really wanted to make a French new wave movie, but had a day job making films for IBM.