Bit and Bytes from TV Ontario

The great Canadian actor Billy Van died 11 years ago; the blog post I wrote to mark his passing continues to get traffic and comments, and I think of Billy often.

I knew Billy for two things: appearances on Party Game and his co-starring role, with Luba Goy, in the TV Ontario series Bits and Bytes. When I wrote that original memorial post in 2002 it seemed that Bits and Bytes, save for a few YouTube videos, was lost to time. But today I stumbled across the entire series in the collection of Archive.org. 

I was 17 years old when Bits and Bytes ran on TV Ontario originally. I was your nerd’s nerd: I had a TRS-80 Model One, a 300 baud modem and printer that printed only in UPPER CASE. The show was, among many things, a sort of vindication of the new world that I’d stumbled into.