Analogue teletext weather maps

So you demonstrate your amazing abilities at changing colours in the 'mode 7' teletext mode by pressing the F-keys, to be given an Electron - a stripped down BBC with rather ironically one of the stripped down things being mode 7 itself!


Indeed, what is often forgotten about the poor old beeb is that it's not just about playing Granny's Garden, Chuckie Egg, and 'Hello World' BASIC programming saved onto tapes - for serious uses it had a huge array of interfaces to connect all manner of peripherals, there was a huge software base and in many ways it was a better and more versatile machine than the IBM PC of the same time! There are things the BBC could do in 1981 which an IBM machine wouldn't be able to dream of until almost 5 years later and which were not commonplace for several more years after that.

Mode 0 was worse, try using that on a TV!



I hope you have the add on cartridge for Mode 7 - or the cludgyness might be lacking something.

Do you think we've left it too late to sue for mis-selling?

True enough I don't remember a mode 7, but mode 5 made the text look chunky.

Does anyone remember the add-on for the BBC Micro which accepted a composite video camera source, and digitised the resultant image as a still ASCII character graphic?

This may be one for the TX Suite.

The expansion bit at the back that rook ROM carts and a joystick? Oh yes I have that.

See - I bet you want to buy it now!

Flashback alert! God I feel old. I still remember the music to it and the fact you had to imagine where you were in order of where to go to avoid the witch. One of those games you were only allowed to play if you were good in class!

At school we had our BBC B's and Masters (and later Archimedes) networked to a central server -a Winchester disc - and so had our own logins, e-mail and storage space. This was in the late 80's, years before those things were common.



Maybe.... but bringing it back on topic, we also had a teletext reciever at school, accesible by any computer on the network. It was possible to print out pages... on an old B&W dot-matrix of course

The screamers as I used to call them.

I'm tempted to write a bit of PHP to spit out a retro weather web site. An ASCII art map with different styles applied to particular groups of characters to specify regions, and generate some CSS based on the BBC weather RSS feeds, and drop in some temperatures from the RSS.

I loved my BBC B. Fantastic machine which we got in about 1985 and worked for years and years and years . It may have only had 32k of RAM but I added a double floppy disk drive and a printer. We even had a package of software called MiniOffice which comprised a word processing package, database with piechart/histogram artwork, spreadsheet on which my father did budgets and a telecomms package which (if you bought an "acoustic telephone coupler") would allow you to talk to other computers via telephone lines (an idea that wasn't to catch on in a really big way until the late 1990s). I used to painstakingly type in programs printed in MicroUser magazine and then get frustrated when after typing 'RUN' you'd get a "Syntax error at line 50"! I had a flight simulator called something like "747" which took 48 minutes to load in from cassette.

Oh and being the true and committed anorak that I was then and still am, I too designed spoof Ceefax Pages in Mode 7. Fantastic.

Memory Lane Pictures:
This is the german version of the BBC Model B computer with a CUB monitor (virtually all schools had these ISTR!"
http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Pics/BBCDE1.JPG

Anyone else remember this manual?!
http://www.instruction-manuals.co.uk/imageIM/four/seven/bbc.gif

Not the BBC coupler I don't think, but this is the 'acoustic coupler' device I was talking about above:
http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/AcousticCoupler-1.gif

Yes they did. Used to be very good at generating static on the tube surface, which sat in a grounded metal bezal. They used to gave you a good jolt if your put your fingers in the wrong place on the screen.

Now I think about it, maybe it was a conspiracy by the designer at Microvitec to encourage kids to keep their grubby fingers off the screen surface

Indeed - those were virtually the only computers my primary school had for the pupils until... oh... around 1994 (give or take a year, when they got a couple of Apple Macs and an Acorn with a GUI, IIRC.)

BTW, what (in technical terms) did SHIFT-BREAK do? I recall that we always had to do that as the first thing when you turned it on.

Shift-Break was load software from the floppy wasn't it? ISTR Shift-N-Break earned you an econet login prompt and ctrl-break was reset.