BBC Engineering

Full access to every issue of "BBC Engineering Magazine".
http://www.bbceng.info/Eng_Inf/eng_inf.htm
Between 1980 and 1993 many BBC engineering activities were described in Eng Inf and a full set of 54 issues forms an excellent record of numerous achievements. The BBC kindly offered a full set for this web site and every issue has now been scanned, OCR'd and saved in PDF form (853 pages!).
There's some amazing historic content here I think you'll find.
Clicking on the Issue Number itself opens the whole issue up in a PDF file.

Many thanks for that pointer MalcyB. What a fascinating resource. You could easily spend days reading through the many articles in there.

It's interesting to see that a lot of things mentioned as cutting edge technology, yet didn't happen or took much longer than anticipated. For example, it's hype about HDTV, which we are only just implementing now. It also mentions Channel 5 as launching in 1993, but it didn't actually happen until 1997. There is also a lot of hype about RDS in them, yet we now see it as something radios 'just do'.

A facinating read however, and even mentions an alternative to the license fee, which I think even now they should impliment.

That's really surprising about HDTV, that they were experimenting with it and that it was known about in the late eighties.

Issue 44 looks quite good when it goes online!

Ditto, took us nearly 20 years before we started to do something about it, lol.

I did mention however that there is a lack of bandwidth. It's only just become possible to easily broadcast HDTV via the use of MPEG4 H.264, and even then it still has it's problems.

Yes, that one rather caught my eye; looking forward to reading it. Nice to see Issue #20 with that article on the COW up there too.

It's great that these have been made available to view, for the sheer content and to gain insight into the development and technical side of various bits of equipment, which I do find interesting.

I remeber seeing an HDTV demonstration by the BBC at the Ideal Home Exhibition around about 1989/90.

It's not a new thing, Japan have been broadcast HDTV since the 80's, also France had 819 line B&W TV in the 40's which is more than the current 720 lines that is classed as HD.

As mentioned above by Orry, HD is very high bandwidth stuff, analogue HD even more so

on a related note I found this today.

http://newsfilm.bufvc.ac.uk/article.php?story=2005100819530312

I'm not sure whether this is accessible to all - please let me know otherwise.

I love the graphics about the houses of the future

What a fantastic find - that really is fab.

Stereo sound eh? Whatever next

personally, my favourite part of the clip is this early rival to the Apple iPhone

http://www.hymagumba.com/uploads/eighties-phone.jpg