Machine arrière

The world before, seen by someone who builds today's systems.

Short videos made from public-domain archive footage — industrial films, corporate documentaries, newsreels — with an original narration in French. Each one shows how a problem we now solve with computers was solved without them.

Watch on TikTok · @machine.arriere

Three series

Systems

How a telephone exchange, a railway or an army moved information before networks did it for them.

Before computers

Calculating, sorting and filing by hand, and the first machines that took the job over.

Advertising, as it was seen

Old commercials and the methods behind them, from the test screening to the slogan.

How it works

1. Sourcing. Only archives whose licence explicitly allows reuse, commercial reuse included — public domain or an equivalent free licence. The licence is checked and recorded with every clip.
2. Writing. The footage is transcribed and analysed, the strongest passage is selected, and an original French narration is written for it.
3. Voice and editing. The narration is read by a synthetic voice and edited onto the footage with subtitles. Videos carry TikTok's AI-generated content label.
4. Human review. The finished video is uploaded as a draft to the author's own TikTok account. Nothing is published until the author has watched it and decided to post it.

What it never does

It never posts on its own, never interacts with other accounts, sends no messages and follows no one. It does not reuse other creators' content or any copyrighted work, and it processes no third-party data. It is a personal project with a single user and a single TikTok account: there is no sign-up.