Hyperland and Doctor Who (Was: 70's computers

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018, ben via cctalk wrote: Not sure, then, how to categorize "Shada". It was a [Tom Baker] Doctor Who story, written by Douglas Adams. It was being filmed in 1979, intended to air in the first couple of months in 1980. But, a labor strike caused it to not get completed. I'd call that "70's". In 2003?, a reconstruction was done, to complete it, using narration by Tom Baker to fill in the missing pieces. Is that still "70's"? Later, in 2017, it was reconstructed again, using animation for the missing scenes. That was released on DVD in UK almost a year ago. The USA release was delayed until last month, and played once on BBC America. Amazon.uk has had it available on DVD for a year; amazon.com (USA) should have it about now. Is that still "70's"? There were a LOT of Doctor Who episodes that got lost. At one time, videotape was more valuable for re-use than the expected unlikelihood of further re-runs. When it became profitable, BBC began reconstruction from VHS, re-transcoding from overseas copies, random archeological finds, etc. A major project. There are still quite a few unaccounted for. Consider: how would you recolourise something being reconstructed from B&W 16mm film? Besides manual and/or computer assisted Turner style recolorization, they developed ways to recolourise working from artifacts, such as the B&W 16mm film being high enough resolution to be able to differentiate the grey images of the RGB pixels of the colour screen that it was filmed from! OB_ON-Topic: In 1991, Douglas Adams, Ted nelson, and Tom Baker made a pre-WWW (or at least before WWW became popular) 25 minute BBC documentary about what the internet would become, called "Hyperland". None of the high-quality studio copies are extant. I talked to Ted Nelson last week; he has/had a studio VHS somewhere, but can't find it; leaving the mediocre ones on WWW, such as archive.org, as the only ones. He asked me whether I could digitize VHS; I assured him that I would improve my capability for such, or have it done commercially. "Hyperland" is NOT available commercially in any format. Last year, I created an .SRT file for it! It is now FINALLY possible to watch "Hyperland" with captions/subtitles! I needed a lot of help from a friend with good hearing, but we got it done! (copies available on request) (caption .SRT files consist of an arbitrary sequence number (like last columns on a punch-card), a start and stop time, and lines of text. When actually used as NTSC closed captions, the text is transmitted as two bytes at a time in line 21 of the verticsl retrace interval) I use ANYDVD and Handbrake to transcode MY DVDs to MP4, always with captions/subtitles. So far, all of mine fit [now barely] on a 7mm SATA 2TB drive out of a Seagate "Backup Plus Slim", which fits into Seagate GoFlex-TV. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com