The teletext photo printer

I didn't know this existed until today, when I found the above photo from DGJones on Flickr. Much like the modern digital camera/memory card printer, this was a built in function in special television models that allowed for the user to print off a teletext screen, presumably around photo size.

Can't find much info about this online but it would have been useful for printing out information about holidays or lottery numbers for purposes of archiving. Seems as though the technology never took off, as I have never come across one of these before. I want one though.

If I could somehow get hold of a series of these printouts it would be a good resource point for the print aspect of this project, or at least an idea for a layout.

Bill Atkinson

Bill Atkinson is a prominent designer and computer programmer, best known for his work on early Mac computers (original Mac system shown left). These are best known for being the first to use Graphical User Interfaces rather than code input interfaces (CLI).

Amongst his creations were MacPaint and the 'marching ants' selection tool. He was also the designer and implementer of HyperCard, a hypertext style system structured like a database of index cards for the Mac. It was used as a presentation method as well as an archiving system, and used a unique coding language that was more or less in readable English.

When Atkinson first started at Apple, he, along with his design team, were charged with creating applications for the Macintosh. Working on limited and restricted specifications (up to what computing power could handle at the time), it was suggested that these ought to be miniature metaphors, such as a calculator or a notepad, on the desktop (as with the control panel, right).

These work with restrictions a bit different to teletext. To start with, screen resolution is much larger, giving the opportunity to work with more intricate graphics. However the colour was limited to greyscale as opposed to teletext's 8-colour palette.
Above are some examples of the kind of icon he would create. The GUI layouts Atkinson would help to develop would become the industry standard, setting the benchmark for future developments, eventually used by other systems including the Windows OS.

Sources
Folklore.org
Wikipedia

Moore's Law

Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, put forward his theory of hardware development in 1965. Basically it states that the number of transistors involved in a chip doubles every two years. Moore actually predicted the future: his theory became a reality with the Intel chip. Maybe this was actually a case of technology using the law to gauge development - in addition, the theory was refined to its current state in 1975. The original prediction was that computer performance would double every 18 months.

According to the graph, at the time of teletext's inception there were only around 10,000 transistors on a chip as compared to over a billion today. The end result is that, as the years passed, technology became smaller whereas teletext remained largely the same. This was not due to lack of technological advances in the medium as such - level two (1981) and later level three (1993) teletext made use of the advanced transistor technology. The problem was the BBC's insistence to stay with the original (level one) format. Elsewhere in the world, these advances were embraced and widely implemented. The result was 'teletext on steroids', varying formats of today's interactive TV.

So, the natural progression would predict that the current teletext format, and along with it its aesthetic, should have been superseded years ago. Maybe due to television formatting, and later apathy towards teletext (BBC had been working on a version Interactive TV which would eventually be the successor to teletext, such was the plan) the original form has been kept since the medium's upgrade in the 1970s.

Sources

Intel
Wikipedia
Teletext timeline at this blog

Teletext and ARPANET

ARPANET was the world's first packet switching network, an early predecessor to the Internet. It was operated by the US Defense Department and worked by organising data into packets, formatted blocks of data for computer formats. It was installed at four locations: Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, University of California and University of Utah.

The system allowed people to send messages between users. The right hand image shows a written log of the first message sent via the network, an early form of e-mails. In fact, one of the timelines I was looking at mentioned the Queen sending an email in the 70s, which I thought strange. There is a perception the Internet was invented in the 90s, and in a way it was - the hypertext browser making data accessible from personal computers only came about in the early 1990s.

In actual fact, Teletext was pre-dated by ARPA. Developed in the late 1960s, it came about a decade before teletext was conceived. In 1970, the network went international, with a station in Norway being added along with one in Hawaii.

Around this time, the BBC had developed a close captioning service to be transmitted via televisions. Teletext, which arrived in 1973, broadcast the information for its service in between PAL transmission signals. It does require an encoder, although this became standard in the mid 90s with all televisions being fitted with this as standard. The Internet, as it is known today, would not become widely available and accessible until the 1990s.

Research from Wikipedia and previous blog posts.