Tag Archives: video

Whiz Kids promo photo

Retro Tech: Whiz Kids

From time to time here, we like to go into the wayback machine and look at some our formative tech influences from early in our development. Well, this week, it’s a pop culture tech entry: the TV show Whiz Kids.

Never heard of it? It ran only for one season. And it featured plotlines like trying to defeat Russians who break into US databases and steal the data — or, in another episode, cybercrimes like online theft. Ripped from the headlines, no?

Except this show ran from 1983 until 1984! Talk about ahead of it’s time…

Of course, there, we lose the realism a bit. Sure, the technology that was employed in the show was pretty true to what was current in that time, and some of the storylines were prophetic. But the overarching plot was about some precocious young hackers who ended up saving the day each week. Which made it pretty unrealistic, but made it a must-watch for this young hacker at the time. That could have been me!

It turns out I’m not alone, either. Not only was it pretty popular among the hacker/geek contingent in the US, but it went over to Europe (in France, it was called Les Petits Génies) and was big among the same group there. According to one French blogger, there are IT professionals across Europe who attribute their interest to watching this show!

Lamentably, in 1983, even though WarGames (a seminal tech movie, and Matthew Broderick’s film debut) was the movie of the summer, the potential audience for Whiz Kids wasn’t big enough for it to last. So after only one season, it went away. (And one of the female leads went on to be on ALF. Talk about adding insult to injury!)

But it still holds a special place in the heart of many, including me.

WebRTC: Live web audio/video chat without plugins

Most of the design and development technologies we work with every day are in ‘evolution’ mode, not ‘revolution’ mode. Enhancements are made, bugs are fixed, but the leaps are relatively small. A browser here adds support for the latest HTML5 canvas feature, a device there adds an API for better map coordination. Nifty, but a little light on the ‘wow factor.’

With the release of Firefox 22 this week, though, there’s a browser advancement that has the potential for a real leap: WebRTC is now baked-in and turned on by default. That means both Chrome and Firefox have it up and running in their latest versions. It will soon be ubiquitous (or perhaps ubiquitous-ish until IE follows along…).

Why is this so great? WebRTC is a W3C standard that allows for real-time communication (thus the RTC) in the browser — audio chats, video chats, whatever. No plug-in for users to download and install. Cross-platform and cross-browser compatible. Just code and go.

It will soon be much more trivial to just throw a video customer-service chat on a help-desk website. Or bake it into a community website to allow for in-site community chats. Or integrate it with the many more social networking sites with varying results depending on the site (you can let your imagination run on that one).

The possibilities are pretty remarkable. It’s a great case of where the technology itself has been around a long time, but by establishing a standard, the power is in the interconnection. Like, I don’t know, almost all Internet-based technologies.

There’s a good getting started tutorial over at HTML5 Rocks, and you can also jump off of the WebRTC home page. Either way, it’s worth a click-around. I think this will be big.