This educational video probably won't win any awards for slick presentation, and its educational value is more than half a century past its sell-by date. But surprisingly, perhaps, it makes fascinating viewing today: as a pioneering example of technology-enabled remote learning in higher education and as a record from the dawn of the IT age, not to mention an entertaining, sometimes comic artefact of a very different time.
The first part of an Introduction to Computers course made by the University of London Television Centre and disseminated to students on video, it's essentially a recorded lecture supported by some pretty basic visual aids and a few short video inserts, produced in a style that might feel familiar to anyone who's ever watched an Open University broadcast from the 1970s or 80s.
With his sensible cropped haircut, sharp glasses, skinny tie and earnest stiffness, presenter Dr Robert Day bears a more than passing resemblance to Talking Heads' David Byrne (circa Once in a Lifetime). But he makes a fluent guide to what must have seemed a bewilderingly alien world to many of his unseen students - and probably will to many watching today. These computers are not desktop-sized, but vast cabinets, storing their data on cumbersome magnetic reels or discs.
Though it's billed as an introduction to the programming language Fortran, this opening class doesn't get further than an explanation of some basic computational concepts. Much of the video is given up to a helpful, thorough (if perhaps slightly laboured) explanation of binary for beginners, which uses a car milometer to convey the challenge of rendering negative integers and decimal fractions in strings of 1s and 0s.
21st-century coders can count themselves lucky they don't have to put up with such headaches - or to compete for a slot to program a solitary shared computer with punchcards...