On Tue, 30 Sep 2008, Gordon JC Pearce MM3YEQ wrote: Indeed. Why are we always shrunk to England, or worse still, London? :o) As a fan of both vinyl and the Spectrum this is very cool... And I know two of the guys from Urusei Yatsura, so will have to ask them about their efforts. Incidentally, I heard someone did an art installation where video was recorded to an acetate, and played back via a record deck. Though I've not been able to find details online. Andrew

I beleive both versions are correct. The Spectrum sold well throughout the UK I believe. It also sold well in England, which is part of the UK. -tony

KJR in Seattle, Washington did this on Sunday afternoons. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.

Indeed. It's certainly correct, I remember recording and using some of those programs. There was a standard called 'Basicode' (or actually Basicode-2). The idea was to get round the incompatibilities between the various (BASIC-programmable) home computers of the time, both differences in the cassette data format and the basic language itself (for example 'clear the screeen' might be 'HOME', 'CLS' or printing a control character depeding on the machine). The Basicode standard used a 1200 baud cassette format using 2 tones -- 1200Hz and 2400Hz. And there aws a set of smachine-specific subroutines to d things like clear the screen, move the cursor, plot a pixel and so on. These all had line numbers <1000 -- your program started at line 1000, and there were fixed entry points for each subroutine. So rather than writing CLS to clear the screen (or whatever), you used GOSUB 100 (I think that was the line). 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). I beleive the idea started in the Netherlands, and the radio programme over there was called 'Hobbyscoop' (probably spelt incorrectly). In the UK, there was a raido programme on Radio 4 (one of the BBC stations) called 'The Chip SHop'. The Basicode programs were called 'The Chip Shop Takeaway service' and were transmitted in the middle of the night, I think the same program on firday, saturday, sunday of each week, so you could have another go if it didn't work first time). I cna well rememebr staying up to record them. For non-UKers, I should perhaps explain the pun in the radio programme title. In the UK, the common, non-computer meaning of 'chip' is a strip of fired potato, (as in 'Fries' across the Pond). A 'chip shop' is a place where you buy food with chips -- things like 'fish and chips', a common takeaway meal here. And of course that explains the 'takeway service' pun. 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. There were at least 2 teletext decoders that connected to the BBC micro, and which presumably could download said programs. Unfortunately I didn't have a BBC micro at the time and by the time I got round to experimenting with teletext decoders, such programs were no longer being transmitted. -tony

In addition to radio and teletext, there was also a TV program in Germany that transmitted software by burying the data in the first few scanlines of the videosignal. The circuit to recover the datastream was quite simple. While the broadcast was running you would see a small box in the upperleft corner where you could actually see the data go by. Jos

After sitting on Vintage-computer.com Erik Klein's manual for, oh, 6 months, I finally got around to scanning it. This has full schematics, diagnostic instructions, reload processes for HD and FDD-only systems, etc... it's a 29MB PDF, so Al Kossow and Gene Buckle, how do i get it to you guys? Tony

On Thu, 2008-10-02 at 00:02 -0400, Roy J. Tellason wrote: Detect vsync then count hsync pulses. Or, if you can make it accurate and stable enough, a monostable. Gordon

--- On Thu, 10/2/08, Roy J. Tellason <rtellason at verizon.net> wrote: From: Roy J. Tellason <rtellason at verizon.net> Subject: Re: Unusual software carriers. (Was :Vinyl Data- Classic Computers ) To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Date: Thursday, October 2, 2008, 10:23 AM On Thursday 02 October 2008 05:27, Gordon J. C. Pearce MM3YEQ wrote: "pick off" a it, Maybe my grasp of current and recent signal processing techniques is a little too tenouous. My recollection of vertical sync is the composite sync pulses fed into an integrator which put out a fairly rounded waveform, giving a "start of sync" point that was fairly ambiguous. Maybe I oughta study up on that there digital stuff. :-) An LM1881 sync separator chip and a counter (or PIC type chip) is all that you need to select a line, or group of lines. Bob

Jos Dreesen / Marian Capel wrote: I think there was some TV program here in the US that did something similar. They sold relatively inexpensive decoders, that I think attached via rs-232, which allowed you to receive the data. I believe, however, that they used the entire screen, or a box in the center of the screen, and everything was visible. I think this was during the 80's. I just stumbled on youtube-ish videos a couple years ago, and was impressed that they were doing such, ummm, high-tech stuff back then.(or seemingly high-tech, right? Distributing software/programs via TV sounds more current-generation comcast cable capabilities than 80's-tech) I think that was a great idea for wide distribution of things. Like multicast traffic today. Anyone know what the name of the programs, or the name of the decoder boxes/technology? Keith

On 07/10/2008 22:36, John Foust wrote: I don't know of any exactly like that, but here in the UK, the BBC provided some "telesoftware" on high-numbered teletext pages, encoded using the CET (Council for Educational Technology) standard, the same as for Prestel (see wikipedia). There were some trials with software for other machines, but almost all the broadcast telesoftware was for the BBC Microcomputer, not surprisingly, for which there were at least two teletext adapters (the original Acorn one and later one from a third party company called Morley Electronics). The teletext adapters connect to a BBC Micro via its 1MHZ expansion bus. Most of the BBC telesoftware was linked to their "Making the Most of the Micro" TV series. There was much more telesoftware on PRESTEL, which was a dial-up viewdata-based information service; 1200 baud downstream and 75 baud upstream. Much of it was on Micronet800 (the home pages, to use a modern term, were 3-digit numbers) and Viewfax258 -- I had some on both, as well as some development pages of my own a few levels under page 500 (IIRC) -- but quite a lot of it cost money. Pages could carry a charge, and even "free" programs cost (in terms of the telephone charges, albeit at low local call rates) but it was quite popular amongst micro users. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

Pete Edwards wrote: No, but my guess would be 50 bits a second. Most likely done by the same branch of the post office, that does mind control. See almost any Dr Who to find out all the details of mind control.

On 08/10/2008 01:47, Andrew Burton wrote: Judith Hann. I don't remember Philippa Forrester being on it but I do remember Maggie Philbin. Perhaps the flashing-square software was in the earlier era of Raymond Baxter and James Burke (which I also remember). -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

Philippa Forrester was a presenter around 1993/4. I admittedly lost interest in the show after she left as it had become more about medical advances and less about electronics by then. It's a shame that there are no longer shows like it on TV. Sure there are gadget shows (eg. The Gadget Show) and stuff, but nothing that actually showed you how it worked from a technical standpoint. It's why list's like this are so useful, and enjoyable, to be part of. Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk --- On Wed, 8/10/08, Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com> wrote: From: Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com> Subject: Re: Unusual software carriers. (Was :Vinyl Data- Classic Computers ) To: "On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Date: Wednesday, 8 October, 2008, 8:22 AM On 08/10/2008 01:47, Andrew Burton wrote: Judith Hann. I don't remember Philippa Forrester being on it but I do remember Maggie Philbin. Perhaps the flashing-square software was in the earlier era of Raymond Baxter and James Burke (which I also remember). -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

On 08/10/2008 21:27, Tony Duell wrote: So it does. I'd forgotten. Yes, the tuning on the Acorn one is definitely not one of its stronger points! Apart from only having four presets, which arguably made sense in the UK in 1982, they're very fiddly to set. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> writes: Yup -- the Advanced Teletext System manual refers to it as "telesoftware". There's a PDF of the ATS manual here containing some screenshots and a brief description of how the data was transmitted: http://www.astro.ljmu.ac.uk/~bbcdocs/hardware/ATS_Handbook.zip Mike Brown's web pages have lots of pictures of the Ceefax Telesoftware service, and the text of the shutdown notice: http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/telesoftware/ -- Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> <http://offog.org/>

Jules Richardson wrote: I've got a Ground Control / Solidisk "Universal Teletext Adapter" kicking around somewhere. It's a nifty little box that contains a Mullard UHF tuner, A/V demodulator (the Aux connector carries composite video and mono audio) and a Philips Teletext decoder chip. The digital interface is I2C -- the stock software communicates over the User Port, but I've got other software that will talk over the Podule bus's I2C port. I've actually got an A3000 (again, *somewhere*) and a RiscPC backplane that have been modified to feed the I2C signal to the "outside world" so I could wire up the UTA... Let me see if I can remember this correctly.. The Domesday system was a Master Turbo with a SCSI card, wired up to a A Philips VP412 Laserdisc player that had been modified to add a SCSI interface and a chroma-keyed genlock. The Master could boot off the LD, load the software, then play back a video clip, still image or what have you. Then there were a few arcade games that used Laserdiscs for cutscenes and such, but I suspect those are off-topic for cc{talk,tech}. -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/

--- On Tue, 9/30/08, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: In keeping with the spirit of this list, who's going to be the first to encode CUTS data on a wax cylinder? Cheers, Chuck

On Sep 30, 2008, at 3:55 PM, Mr Ian Primus wrote: The primary reason is that it will only work in a handful of specific configurations, and assuming that everybody with a turntable at their disposal is able to comply is not really a sound business decision. There are only a small number of standalone turntables I am aware of which had (have) normal line outputs. The vast majority of them require preamplification (and equalization) if they are to be used on a line input. The "phono" input on many amplifiers provides this preamplification; in this case the amplifier's line out or tape monitor output may be connected to the computer without consternation. It's possible that some all-in-one style units may have had line outputs to connect, for example, cassette tape recorders; I don't know. Perhaps most at the time had a cassette deck built in and thus only speaker outputs. ok bear

Correct, I have one : it is translucent blue color. It contains some programs for their SC/MP machine. Never could afford the machine itself.