Medieval helpdesk with English subtitles

NRK0 HN recommenders · 2009–2024
6.5M views · comedy · evergreen · Uploaded 2007-02-26

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.

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

Watch on YouTube

5 comments from Hacker News

@pclark2009 · in “Twi.bz: the transparent URL shortener”

thats a remarkable service. They take this ugly url: [VIDEO] [38 characters] and turn it into this pretty url: [LINK] [47 characters] their "pretty" url is much longer than the original one. What the hell!?

CriticalView on HN
@stan_rogers2011 · in “When hard books disappear”

I'm on the "dead trees or their equivalent forever" side myself (search doesn't work well with paraphrases, and the physical book has more physical cues for random retrieval of imperfectly remembered passages), but "the 'flip pages with your finger' UI has proved immensely durable" requires a link to this classic clip from Øystein og jeg : [VIDEO]

@kstenerud2011 · in “Scrollbars: Why is Apple eradicating a linchpin of user interface design?”

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.

@geenew2023 · in “The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012”

> 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]

@RecycledEle2024 · in “I don't want anything your AI generates”

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]