boblipton

It is often interesting to look at old technical documents, if only to understand the history and evolution of a technique or system. This short training film -- mentioned as the first of a series -- offers a brief history of computing techniques, from fingers through Pascal's adding machine, through a glimpse of then current computers, with a brief discussion of binary numbers, punch cards, and tape feeds. It discusses computers purely as numerical devices, with no hint of the advances that various computer languages or technical advances such as chips, that would come into common use later. Any further discussion of how to use computers is left as a problem for later films.... and computer technicians.

This industrial film was sponsored by the Willard Storage Battery Division of the Electric Storage Battery Company. Now you understand why they made it: to talk up the storage battery with its distinguished history of Italian noblemen and modern science. If you're interested in the subject, you'll find it of some interest. We still use lead batteries, of course. If you have a gasoline car, you almost certainly have a lead battery in there.

Leslie Howard is a British officer at a poorly maintained POW facility n Germany. Fortunately, he is able to get some privileges for his fellow prisoners; the commandant, Paul Lukas, also went to Oxford. This leaves Howard plenty of time to brood about his wife, Margaret Lindsay, who hasn't written. When old friend Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Shows up, he gets him assigned as a bunk mate. This drives Fairbanks to distraction, because he has been carrying on an affair with Miss Lindsay.

There are universities in Germany besides Heidelberg, I'm sure of that, so why does every German officer seem to have gone to Oxford? Weren't there any who went Tubingen or Cambridge? Or was that University reserved for chieftains of cannibal tribes who when complimented on their English, would reply "Yes, it was traditional when I went to Cambridge?" This worrying question was soon driven from my head by th sheer coincidence of the plot, the ease with which Fairbanks escaped from camp and made his way back to the British lines, and so forth, all ending in a marvelous ending in which Howard machine guns every German soldier. It's all nonsense, but marvelously performed in best stiff-upper-lip fashion.