Be Excellent To Each Other

..tard.

Wow! After 26 years we can now access it.

Here

It's a shame it doesn't emulate a BBC Master, but quite fun to look at photos of the country from a quarter century ago.

It was the classic example of digital obsolesce. Two big laserdiscs connected to a BBC Master, containing pictures and text from across the country, which nobody could access anymore.

The Beeb's write up of the background.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/d ... /picture/3

In the background is my dad on his model traction engine.
Which they've called a train.

[edit]I think that's me in the red shorts, toward the left of the picture.
[edit][edit]That's my brother driving the engine, actually.

I remember this shit! They had an accompanying TV show which was only notable for having The Cure's 'A Forest' as the theme tune.

I'm kind of torn as the entire thing was rather a white elephant with editorial control that would make Wikipedia blush. One entry reads:


The images were stored at such a low resolution as to be pretty useless (720x576i but in practice near half of that) and the text is not very insightful. While it wowed the schoolkids in 1986 I remember having a go on one in Chessington and thinking there was remarkably little information in it



*

Oh, very much a white elephant. But, its idiosyncrasies and sometimes odd content might form part of its charm.

Some of it is very much of its time - this is near to Kern Hall:



http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/d ... 00/page/11

EDIT: I'm guessing that the text had to be short to such to fit onto a Mode 7/Teletext screen.

Heh.



Bet they regret that, now.

That's lovely.

Notorious hedgehogs? Are they highwaymen?

How did it actually work then? For some reason, I'm remembering that the pictures were fed through to the monitor from the disc player rather than displayed by the Micro. Is that right? I've only seen one of these setups once, when I was about 13.

The Spiny Brothers.

That's the explanation Wikipedia gives too. Just get the Beeb to overlay the text onto a still image provided by the laserdisc. Quite an elegant solution to the problem of how to display photos on a system with only 8 colours.

Sub-Wikipedia kinda nails it.

The photos I've found look like they could've been taken in 2011, on an overcast Wednesday afternoon through a camera on a budget mobile phone. But then that probably just indicates that I live in a area mostly inhabited by pensioners who dress old-fashioned and drive very old cars.

Some kind of genlock system I'm guessing. Quite easy to do.

The system wasn't a vanilla BBC Micro, but a Master Turbo. Essentially a BBC Master with a co-processor. They also added a SCSI interface.

Ahhhh, remember SCSI. Does anyone still use it?

We have a DVD duplicator with a SCSI hard disk. Other than that, I haven't seen one in years

No. My A1200 has it though, with several SCSI HDs, CD ROM and Zip drive.

*flashback to 1999 and University days*

*involuntary shudder*

I know right.

Kissyfur knows wrong.

Ball ache if the IDs weren't right.


No, thank fuck.

BBC Masters and Model B's seem to be going for £129-£200 on eBay. Wow.

Shit, seriously? I gave my tricked out 'B' away about 5 years ago.

I have a Master but it has "xyz college" stencilled onto it which makes it look stolen. Reality was the physics dept were binning them and they were free to a good home.

Could be worse. You could have binned your Lynx and Gx4000 and all the games. About 300 quids worth in today's money. :-(

Our oldest production database uses a SCSI-based SAN disk system.

FTFY (personal regret)

Viewers can work the last post out for themselves as I'm on my phone and editing just makes it worse. :-(

They are fantastic machines, and very expandable. It would be impressive to wire one up to a modern flatscreen, but I think BeebEm gives me the retro-fix I need (and I finally reached level 5 of 'Chuckie Egg' the other week, after all these years).

I'd do it but I have no love for them. Poor mans CPC.

haha, as if!

Well you say that but the CPC did chip into Acorns educational market. For the same price as a BBC B with 32k and no monitor or storage, you could have a CPC 6128 with colour monitor and a built in disc drive The CPC also had 128k of memory and came with the industry standard CPM operating system.

Now granted the Acorn was more expandable but it's arguable if most people ever used many of the ports. In fact, barring Econet, pretty much all of the commonly run expansions were also available on the CPC. Companies such as DK'Tronics and Rombo made a living out of churning out all sorts of CPC expansions:



You could get video digitisers, scanners, hard disks, external disk drives, light pens, modems, RS232 interfaces, external ROM boxes for software, you name it you could probably get it.

And of course the number 1 peripheral of all time* was never available for the BBC.



Yes the BBC was very expandable but at the price it was it bloody well should have been. And that's not before we even get to the hardware itself which was already showing it's age by the time the 464 was launched (which had twice as much memory, over 3 times the colours and a better version of Basic%).



* Seriously. Just imagine if you had a Multiface 2 today for your Xbox, PS3 or PC. Copy any game, save states whenever you want, hack any piece of software. The Multiface 2 was, and remains, awesome.

% Better because Locomotive blatantly borrowed alot from BBC Basic but improved on it.

Who poked Chinny's Amstrad nubbin? It'll never heal if you keep picking at it, you know.

Just setting the record straight. There's so much Acorn propaganda these days that us CPC owners need to set the record straight.

"These days"? Halfway through 2011, you claim there's a lot of Acorn propaganda about?!

Sadly there is. There was an article on the BBC website the other week, and just the other day David Braben was going on about the BBC being important for bedroom coders. Like many people could afford to have one in their bedroom. Bedroom coders used Speccies, C64's or like the Oliver Twins, a CPC.

Even Micro Men was skewed towards Acorn. History seems to be being rewritten to enhance Acorn's significance. But given the number of machines they produced compared to their rivals and the fact the majority of sales were into the educational market they were really a fringe player outside of their core markets.

Even in software shops or places that sold games, you might see the occasional budget Electron game but that was it. Hell I'd see XL/XE software more often that Beeb stuff.

I think that Old Man Afterthought has 3(count 'em - Ed) Model Bs in the loft.

Can I have one?

I managed to blow my Model B up when I was a youngster - I'd spent hours programming a little text adventure game of my own devising, only to find my tape deck to be fucked. My father told me to leave the machine switched on while he bought me another.

Yeah, taking three days to buy a new tape deck turned out to be not so good for the poor old Beeb.

Ouch. Probably fixable if you still had it. I strongly suspect it was heat related as the PSU was inside the main case.

I believe we do still have it. My dad was an electrical test engineer back then and located some kind of fault with one of the microchips in there, something to do with the amount of power it was drawing from the PSU, but I'm nowhere like as clued up as he was. Anyway, we ordered a replacement chip, he removed the old one, soldered in the new one and restarted. And it booted!

Sadly, it appears the blown chip was the BASIC OS ROM. So what we had was a Beeb that would boot as normal, with the 'BBC Computer 32K' bit and a cursor, but no mention of the word BASIC and no ability to recognise any commands input into it.

I'm sure it still must be fixable, but only by someone with more expertise than myself or my father.

Is tempted. But no.

Congratulations. I wubbed Chucky Egg. Still do.