The Prelinger Archives is a vast and wonderful collection of “ephemeral” films: documentaries, educational films, advertisements, and industrial footage, all in the public domain. We asked Megan Prelinger to share a recent favorite from the collection, and she shared this little gem.

Megan Prelinger: This is a stop-motion animation about new ideas in mainframe computing, using wooden blocks and hand-made drawings on construction paper to illustrate the ideas. With an acoustic guitar soundtrack, this is an interesting period piece using folk-revival style graphics and music to describe technological advances that had their initial primary applications in the Cold War military industry.

For more videos from the Prelinger Archives, see http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger.