Medieval helpdesk with English subtitles

NRK · 6.5M views · 2007-02-26 · 2:45

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Overview

A classic Norwegian TV comedy sketch from NRK's show Oystein og jeg, subtitled in English, in which a monk calls a helpdesk to learn how to use a book instead of a scroll.

On Hacker News

HN drops it as a joke whenever threads touch on new interfaces, books or technology confusing users.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2009–2024

Topics

Stand-up & sketch comedy Satire & parody

What people said

RecycledEle · 2024-02 · Joke / meme
When Gutenberg asked people what they thought of his printing press, they replied that it lacked the soul of a hand-copied book and they would never buy a book printed on it. Also relevant: [VIDEO]
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geenew · 2023-02 · Joke / meme
> reading books Not sure how much currency this has lately, but back at the dawn of Web 2.0, this was well-known comedy. Relates 'books' to 'tech'. Medieval helpdesk: [VIDEO]
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kstenerud · 2011-11 · Joke / meme
Pages were superior because: 1. Scrolls were more difficult to handle as you read. 2. You could jump around to various places in a long book document, but with a scroll you had to manually unravel it to the point you were looking for, a time consuming process. 3. Books were not without their difficulties, however: [VIDEO] But in all seriousness, the scroll concept works perfectly well, in fact better than the book concept, provided you have the right technology to drive it. And modern computers have that technology. I can use a search box to jump to wherever I want. I can quickly scroll up and down in the document using a scroll bar rather than paging through a book.
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Sources

Video by NRK, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

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