[HN Gopher] A chimpanzee brought Xerox to the masses
___________________________________________________________________
A chimpanzee brought Xerox to the masses
Author : geox
Score : 80 points
Date : 2023-07-12 00:38 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| jh00ker wrote:
| The guy in the first video is NOT Douglas Engelbart... right?
| [deleted]
| type0 wrote:
| In the 50s Bedtime for Bonzo was still in the public
| conciousness, and that popularity of chimps on screen continued.
| Nobody knew for sure that we were so close to the chimps
| genetically but everyone was suspecting that, hence so much
| curiosity. Remember it was still before Jane Goodall
| every wrote:
| There was also J. Fred Muggs:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Fred_Muggs
| p1mrx wrote:
| > Competitors said no photocopier could work that easy or that
| fast. They said the ad exaggerated the speed of the machine.
|
| If they wanted to communicate how fast the machine is, they
| should've filmed it without a bunch of cuts.
| Animats wrote:
| This was from an era when national broadcast commercial time
| was very expensive. Only three networks, and only 4 to 6
| minutes of commercials per hour.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| They made and aired a 90 second ad which could have showed
| the entire process uncut, but they wasted a lot of the ad
| time with pointless filler of a little girl walking around
| and whatnot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7gxp9JKqDQ
| starkparker wrote:
| Because watching a copier from 1959 actually, literally
| take 40-odd seconds to make one copy in real time is
| boring, even if it was novel for the time. The ad's runtime
| took as much time as the copier, which was the point.
|
| Yeah, it's filler. They did a bunch of filler ads. The
| article ignores this one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vJk_JVl9ME
| AlbertCory wrote:
| So: you're critiquing the editing of a commercial from 60+
| years ago? The point being... what?
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Paraphrasing:
|
| > > > p1mrx: _they should have show it working unedited_
|
| > > Animats: _commercials were very expensive_ [implying
| it was too expensive to run a commercial long enough to
| show that]
|
| > me: _they _did_ run a sufficiently long commercial_
| [the price of commercials was not the problem.]
| dmbche wrote:
| Cinematic taste came a long way since - I don't think most
| people were even aware of the cuts back then. The Taken movies
| have a lot to do with that!
| joemi wrote:
| Why Taken? I was a moviegoer well before the Taken series,
| and people (normal people) were definitely aware of cuts. In
| particular they'd come up in conversation with action movies,
| or any movie where a music video director made the leap to
| films.
| dmbche wrote:
| It's a joke - there was a very well known scene where I
| think they cut 15 times in 5-10 seconds to show Liam Neeson
| jumping a fence. (Edit:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by4UZ-79MK4 )
|
| I'd say moviegoers were more aware of filmmaking starting
| in the 80s, and most people know about complex things like
| green screens and the like today.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Mind-blowing stop motion technology innovated by Taken
| Someone wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_914#Sales:
|
| _"The second television commercial produced by Xerox for the 914
| featured a trained chimpanzee using the copier. The day after the
| commercial debuted, the company received calls from angry
| customers complaining of co-workers leaving bananas on the copier
| and suggesting that a monkey could do their jobs. The commercial
| was taken off the air.[1]"_
|
| [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=ZYurhbUh_2gC&pg=PA61
| tinyplanet-o wrote:
| I hate to be that guy, but chimpanzees are apes, not monkeys (as
| mentioned in the article).
| blowski wrote:
| You are right in the scientific sense, but it's totally valid
| in colloquial language.
|
| https://www.wordnik.com/words/monkey
|
| > A nonhuman ape. Not in scientific use.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Thank you.
| eric-burel wrote:
| This distinction doesn't exist in French. There's probably an
| interesting story explaining why the English language had to
| distinguish monkeys with a tail and monkeys without one.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| I can't believe chimpanzee wasn't taken until this year. What
| a find. Humanzee, however, was taken in 2009 and hasn't
| posted since then.
| quercusa wrote:
| A 90-second commercial seems glacially slow.
| masswerk wrote:
| For a TV intermission ad just perfect. (On the other hand,
| nowadays, some YT ads feel much longer.)
| circuit10 wrote:
| YouTube ads are usually 5 seconds if you skip them, I don't
| see longer ones that often
| taneliv wrote:
| Maybe they start feeding you longer ads if you don't skip
| them? I never skip (but I don't watch much of Youtube,
| either), just turn the volume down to zero.
|
| Yeah, some ads are about 6s. Many are 15-30s. Some are
| around 1 minute. Several have been about 5 minutes, this
| seems actually quite common. The longest I've seen was
| about 2 hours and 10 minutes.
| berbec wrote:
| I'm trying to think of the last time a product came out and the
| public and government's response was "That's so amazing, it has
| to be fraud", but it was legitimate. I'm a little tired, so all
| I'm drawing is a blank.
| gwern wrote:
| That's been a very common reaction to many deep learning
| successes the past few years. I lost track of how many people
| seriously suggested that a GPT-3 output might be some
| outsourced laborer in realtime, never mind how fast the output
| came back for arbitrary inputs!
| copperx wrote:
| This year, a few months ago, GPT-4 was made available. Is it
| that far away already?
| minutillo wrote:
| Some examples:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007385
| smugma wrote:
| Dan Ariely is not a great source to reference these days.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| At one time, Xerox was about the hippest company on the planet.
| Hard to believe, I know:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAt-lB9JIqw
|
| Brother Dominic (who was, in reality, a Jewish comedian) came to
| the Xerox Star launch at NCC in 1981.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >For a personal demonstration, simply call your nearest Xerox
| office.
|
| Oh I'm definitely calling, and insisting they send a chimpanzee
| out to personally demonstrate!
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Here is a 14 minute presentation from the same Xerox that covered
| what else the machine could do. A very different kind of 1960s
| cool.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPtRMQMRyrg
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-12 23:00 UTC)