2 Oct
2008
2 Oct
'08
6:01 a.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
You bought (at least in the UK) a cassette where side
1 cotnained
machine-specific traslator/subrotuing programs -- for the PET, BBC Micro,
TRS-80, etc, Siee 2 contained various demo programs in Basicode. You
lioaded the appropriate translator for your machine and could then load a
Basicode program (either from side 2 of the tape or one you'd recorded
off the radio).
Indeed - I had one of those tapes, although I'm not sure if I still do; I
think I may have parked it at Bletchley before I left the UK. Somewhere I
still have an Acorn doc related to their implementation of the standard.
Now, there was also a brief move to transmit data via TV for home computers in
the UK (as mentioned by others for other countries) - I can't for the life of
me remember what that was called, as I think it was something other than
Basicode. (My brain wants to say it transmitted as part of the Teletext signal
for use with the various Teletext adapters - Morley, Acorn etc. - but I'm not
certain). I do have some documentation on it, but of course it's stuck in
storage 4000 miles away :-(
I also believe that some programs for the BBC micro
were transmitted as
pages on the BBC's (TV company) teletext system -- probably pages with
hex digits in the page number, whioch could not be displayed on most TVs.
Gaaah, read entire message before typing, Jules :-)
Hopefully someone has a name for it, though.
There were at least 2 teletext decoders that connected
to the BBC micro
I think someone - possibly Morley - did one for the Spectrum, too.
cheers
J.