Benjamin Law
speaker
327 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2020
last heard 3d ago
Benjamin Law’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Personal computers are so ubiquitous now that most of us carry one in our pockets, all day, every day.
It's hard to imagine a time when computers were inaccessible to everyday people, and so big they filled entire rooms and were mainly used for specialist tasks like processing scientific data or sending men to the moon.
So when computers did start entering the home in the 1980s, how humans interacted daily with machines changed forever.
Now maybe I'm giving away my age, but I remember when I was 12 years old, we got our first beast of a computer in my family, a Hewlett-Packard with storage that was minuscule and a desktop footprint that was huge.
We used it mainly to play Prince of Persia, Carmen Sandiego and Gossip with Friends on ICQ.
Mel Huang Buntine is a designer and technologist, and she was gifted her first computer as a tween living in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in the 1990s, and it was a hand-me-down beige box of a thing.
And it was a big deal.
Her great-grandmother, grandparents and mum had all escaped the Cambodian genocide as refugees.
And they could not understand why Mel was obsessed with this machine.
But that computer completely opened up Mel's world and would end up changing her life.
And now she's curated an exhibition called Radical Computing at the National Communication Museum.
Hey, Mel.
Hello.
Hey, Mel, tell me more about your very first computer, this beige box, as I called it before.
So it was benign.
It was beige.
It didn't even have an operating system.
And at the same time, what did it mean to you personally to be gifted this computer as a hand-me-down?
And when you say the outside world was scary, how scary was it?
What are we talking about?
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