Some contemplating on frame storage formats and clashes therein

I recently posted a little bit on how I now store contributed videotex (teletext and viewdata) frames within a database, so as to make accessing them far easier on the application side.

To do this, I had to decide on exactly how to store the visible content of the frame.  Everything else is easy; I crated a secondary table holding key=>value pairs, which means it is very easily expandable, and any application needing particular data can go look for it's own, and not be confused by anything extra.

So. The frame content itself.  I didn't get much help looking at existing storage formats, as I've got at least 17 types documented, and others I know about.  I may however have been influenced somewhat by them.

When you think about a viewdata frame, or a teletext page, you automatically see the 23-25 lines by 40 columns of static image.  Almost every frame you will find that has been saved out by a terminal emulator, or teletext captures, will consist of those 920, 960 or 1000 bytes of data, perhaps with some meta-data accompanying, sometimes not.  I think that every third-party viewdata host that I have so far encountered also stored its pages so.  Individual characters took up a single bytes as per their ASCII character code, and colour and control characters were also stored as a single byte.  For teletext, this uses the non-display codes below the space, as there is no concept of cursor movements, carriage returns, etc, on a teletext screen, which is what these values are used for in a serial-terminal based service.

Prestel, and viewdata generally, is however serial.  Frames are sent to the user as ASCII characters, but the colour and control codes are sent as command sequences:  Escape then a capital letter.  So, what might be stored in a teletext page as "<01>RED<02>GREEN<07>WHITE" would be sent to a viewdata terminal as "<ESC>ARED<ESC>BGREEN<ESC>GWHITE".  Short lines would be terminated by a carriage return and linefeed, so reducing the need to send the whole 40 characters.

Now.. Prestel itself is known to have stored the frame data exactly as it would be sent to the user.  There was a hard limit of 920 bytes available to the editor to use, and colour codes, etc, took up two of them.  This made creating complicated graphical pages somewhat difficult, as too many colour changes could quickly eat up all the allocation.  (Response frames were even worse; you only got 716 bytes to play with!)  This is probably why all third party viewdata servers stored their page as the 22x40 character full image, with the control codes stored as per teletext.  Doing this allowed for much more colour and graphic rich content than was possible on Prestel itself - the conversion was done on transmission.  The actual codes stored varied - some systems used 7 bit data throughout, some used top-bit sett letters to indicate that letter needed the escape sending before it, some used 7 bits for visible characters, and top-bit set control codes (codes in the range 128-159) and at least one had everything with the top bit set!

So fast forward 30 years, and I'm writing code to handle saved viewdata pages and display them on this new-fangled World Wide Web thing.  There is zero support for viewdata and teletext format images, so we have to roll our own, converting saved pages in any number of formats into PNG or GIF (to account for flashing characters) images that a web browser can display.

As an intermediate stage, I have to pull that 22-24x40 matrix of characters out, before plotting them onto a graphics image for sending to the viewer.  This intermediate block of characters I called an "internal" format, and was 7-bit clean, so codes below space for the colour codes, and the rest visible.

For nearly ten years this worked fine, and this internal, intermediate format, was the format used when I created the page database.

It is only this week I hit a problem with this, and it is down to a peculiarity with how Prestel stores Response Frames.  (And, I assume, other frames that are not simple static pages.)

A response frame contains a number of fields that are defined by the editor when they create it, and are either filled automatically by the Prestel server when it displays the page, or  can contain text or data to be entered by the user.  When the user hits # on the last field, they are given the option to send (or not) the page to the IP.  It is then delivered to their mailbox in a filled-in state.

When defining a response frame in the standard Prestel online editor, a field is specified by typing, e,g. Crtl-L n 30 Ctrl-L will create a field of 30 characters length containing the subscribers' name - on pressing the second Ctrl-L the system will display 30 "n"s in the required position.  The same procedure is repeated for any other field you request.  What gets stored in the Prestel database is a single Ctrl-L and 30 "n"s.

When you retrieve a page from Prestel using the "Bulk" Online editor, it is sent exactly as stored, so you get the Ctrl-L and sequence of letters alongside the Escape'd colour codes and CR/LFs for short lines.  Uploading a replacement frame you specify the layout in the same manner.

Those of you familiar with the standard ASCII control codes will recognise that Ctrl-L is also known as "Clear Screen", and is a character that is usually sent before sending the frame content.  This is probably why it was used for this purpose - finding it in the middle of the frame content would not make sense, so it was re-purposed as a flag for start-of-field.  Obviously this is never actually sent to the user, but is replaced by a space when viewing on a terminal.

Now ...

I have two small databases in my posession that were pulled back down from Prestel at some point, and these include a number of Response Frames.

When I converted the data to my "internal" format to load them into the database, this normalised the control codes to 7-bit data, filling that lower 32 bytes of the table.  On displaying, these codes were sent as <Esc><code + 64>, this recreating the colour sequences.

When it comes to a <ctrl l>, however, this was never stored in the database - the normalisation routine ignored it.  However, even if it had been saved, on recall, it would have been translated into an <Esc>L, the sequence to end double-height text.

So, to summarise, the normalisation I did, in most cases, lost the start-of-field character because it wasn't expected in a frame.  And if it did make it though, it would be indistinguishable from the "Single Height" code, and as that was allowed anywhere in a response frame, it couldn't be deduced from context.

I never noticed, because there were so few frames affected, and there was no need to process the fields the code indicated, anyway!

This last month, however, I've been working on a viewdata host program that will run on a modern server, and which I could use to receate the look and feel of using the original Prestel service.  I've been testing this using an actual Prestel terminal, and it's been great fun!  It's only when I stumbled across one of these response frames, and decided to support them, that I discovered this problem!

Looking into how other file formats solved this, it seems that at least one of them uses <Esc> itself as the field indicator.  If  stored in the database like that, when expanded on recall this would translate into an unused code sequence, in viewdata, so is a suitable alternative.  I will translate the affected pages, eventually!


So, a decision taken about 10 years ago came back to bite me this week. And it's all to do with 25 year old data in a file format determined 40 years ago that everyone else decided needed to be done differently.

Well done for making it this far!


As an aside .. Prestel added support for "Dynamic frames" which were basically frames that could contain cursor movement characters.  This meant you could go back and change things after you had already drawn them.  This was easy for them, as they stored data in an as-transmitted form anyway.  It's no so easy for host software that expects it's frames to be stored in a fixed matrix!  I'll be working on this, one I find some original examples....

The Videotex Database - submit your pages now!

When I started viewdata.org.uk (and teletext.org.uk), I just uploaded the pages and databases I had as-is, and had my scripts deal with them on an as-accessed basis.  This is because I wanted to preserve the data as much as possible - any translation to a new format (such as JPEGs) would inevitably lose data, as well as context.

As time has moved on, and as the variety of data formats I have had to deal with has proliferated, this has increasingly become somewhat unwieldy. I decided, therefore, to try and rationalise things somewhat.

Each of the various file formats I was dealing with had different properties. Each had strengths, and each had weaknesses.  I could not decide on a single common format to try and convert files into.

Rather than create a new "perfect" file format, I decided therefore to store the frames within a database.  By having a primary table for the page content and certain static data, and a separate table for meta-data, any particular properties a particular file format had could be accommodated.

Once the data is held within a standardised database, of course, it makes it much easier to access it and use it from many different applications.  The first, and most obvious, is the ability to search across the entire database for key words or phrases. This is implemented on the front page of the database.

The main in-browser viewer for the saved pages implements a timeline function, where you can see how a given page has changed over time.  See, for example, the CEEFAX news headlines.

And of course, for viewdata pages, once can implement a dial-up host, so 1980s terminals can connect directly into the service and browse it exactly as they did at the time.  (This is mostly done, just pending further tidying up!)

Currently the database contains page data I have collected myself or already been sent. However I am aware that there is a vast amount more out there.  Jason Robertson has been amazing at rescuing teletext pages off old video tapes, and I know of at least one previous Prestel IP that has a massive archive of pages still extant, albeit sat on very old hardware.  I've got part of The Gnome At Home, and I know the rest still exists.

This week's task (one of the various "I'll do something" for Retrochallenge 2018/09) was to create a page for viewers to directly submit their pages to the database.  This is now complete!  It actually places the data into a queue, after briefly validating it, so it can be checked and added later.  I would welcome any contributions, anything from a single frame to a complete service backup!  If you need help, feel free to drop me a line.

A Viewdata Host

One of my aims when setting up viewdata.org.uk was to create a means by which readers could experience connecting to a viewdata service, and also to use such to present what saved pages we had in an appropriate context.

Sadly, there was nothing available that I could find that would allow me to run an actual host, and although I had some success firing up my old BBC Micro based viewdata BBS, this didn't last long due to multiple hardware failures.

Back up to today, and, as I mentioned yesterday, John Newcombe has written, and is running, his own viewdata host called TELSTAR.   I've discussed some things with John, and had been hoping to blag a copy of the software, but it seems that it's not quite what I am looking for.

Now, I have been building up a database of frames - this is yet another unfinished project - over at db.viewdata.org.uk.   This database is what I want to use as the source of the data for a host system.
Although it's mostly got teletext loaded up, I do have a complete copy of the PC Plus demo of Micronet loaded up, which can act as a starting point.

So, what to do?  Well it's obvious, write my own host software.  I've been putting this off for years, but, it's #retrochallenge time, and I do want to achieve something...

A few hours last night got the bare bones sorted out, and a bit of time debugging, and we're at a point where I can dial in and navigate between pages!  Woo!

Whereas John has been concentrating on content for his viewdata host, I'm going to be working on making mine more of a "Prestel Emulator"; it should feel as close to the original as possible.  I've a lot to do, obviously, but not bad for an few hours work.

Modem Emulation - an RC2018/09 prologue

Most of you will know by now that I'm really into preserving the memory of Prestel and Viewdata systems generally.  I run www.viewdata.org.uk which, while a bit long in the tooth, is going to get a massive update "soon" ...   But today I'm going to talk about hardware.

Some time back, I fired up my old viewdata BBS "Ringworld" - this operated on a collection of BBC Micros - one per connected user - and an Acorn A5000 acting as fileserver.  I connected these to the internet using a motly selection of modems, ATA telephony adapters, and serial terminal adapters.

The long shot was, for a user dialling in, the call was answered either by the exact same modem it always had been, connected to a SIP ATA - the digital data was transformed to analogue, before being turned back to digital by the modem.  This always seemed like a poor idea to me. What would be better is if some bit of software answered that digitised telephone call, looked at the whistles and warbles, and turned it directly into a sequence of ASCII bytes for delivery to a telnet port.

I had found an program called iaxmodem that allowed an asterisk based PBX to emulate a modem, but it was focused on faxing, and I just couldn't get it to work with the V23 dial-up I wanted.  But it was close.   I spent the next few years, off and on, searching for changes to that, or SIP based alternatives, with no luck.

In the meantime, John Newcombe decided to write his own viewdata host service, called Telstar, in Python, and that can be accessed via a raw-socket. (like telnet, but without the features!)  There's not a lot of software out there that can talk both Viewdata display protocols and connect to a socket, however.  Richard Russell wrote a example viewdata client that could do it, and you can connect from BeebEm if you load up a suitable comms package and set the RS423 IP parameters. 

There have also been a couple of projects to produce a "WiFi Modem" that, basically, looks like a hayes-compatible modem that you connect to via RS232, but it in turn connects to your WiFi, and onwards to a telnet port out on the internet.  This is great for things like BBC Micros, Commodore 64s, etc., where you can just swap out your period modem for this new device.   Not so good for dedicated terminals, or e.g. the ZX Spectrum VTX5000 where the modems are built in.

Then, out of the blue, an old friend, Darren Storer, posted on the BBC Micro facebook group (I think it was there..) that he'd set up a dial-up number for Telstar, and could people test it.  It took me a week or two to get there, but I pulled out a terminal, dialled the number ... and it didn't work.  Not at all.  I did, however find out the software he was using ...  asterisk-Softmodem.  This was exactly the sort of project I'd been looking for all those years.  But, it didn't work for him/

I pulled the code and had a look, and could see nothing wrong.  So, firing up an asterisk server, and installing it, I tried to debug.  The first issue was my terminal was not locking onto the carrier, so I added a t(-10) to increase the volume, and that sorted that!

Next problem, I wasn't getting much data on screen - many characters were just missing!   This was somewhat easy to diagnose, as I had an inkling after seeing how you configured asterisk to use softmodem - you specified the number of data bits, being between 5 and 8.  The example had it as 8. Now Prestel, and of course the terminals, all used 7 bits with even parity. What I was seeing was the terminal being sent 8-bit data, and of course interpreting that as most of the characters having an incorrect parity bit, and ignoring those!

Now, I can set a software terminal to 8bit data, but not the termnal - there  is very little you can configure as a user on these things.  Because the project had no support for parity it looked like a dead end, but that wasn't going to stop me - I'd waited years to find this, and wasn't going to give up now!

Delving into the code, it actually turned out to be a nice simple and straightforward bit of programming.  Adding parity support turned out to be fairly easy... I've published the modifications to my own github fork and submitted a pull request to send them back to the original author.

So now, I can dial into Telstar, CCL4, or anywhere I want to set up a number for!

If you want to try it, the number for Telstar is 0333 340 3311 (from outside UK, +44 333 340 3311). Calls cost the same as an 01 or 02 and are included in any inclusive minutes you may have. Call s are free for A&A customers.)

I can't guarantee that number will stay up, and it may not work from time to time if I'm tweaking things, but if it turns out useful to you, please let me know in the comments below!

Trying hard

It's six weeks since my dad died.  It's been .... difficult.

Then the suicide bomber at Manchester Arena last week.  Targeting kids, and the parents waiting to pick them up.  Kids!  One casualty was only 8!!

My daughter is 10.  Had her music tastes been different, it's possible we would have been there - she reports one of the kids in her class actually was at the concert; school sent round a letter saying several pupils had been there, but all were safely accounted for.  It's only a couple of miles away, I saw some of the ambulances rushing in that night!

So that hit me hard.  I spent the next few days feeling stunned. Shell-shocked, I guess.  Fighting back tears all the time.  Just like most people in the area!  I've been glued to the TV News, glued to Twitter, had local radio on in the car and kitchen... watching the local paper websites..  It does seem that the Police have a handle on things, which is gratifying, and they are making progress tracking down all those whom have connections with the bomber.

To try and recover, I've tried throwing myself at various unrelated projects. Here are some of them -

• Finishing the stuff I started for Retrochallenge..
• Cataloguing and Imaging the vast number of BBC Micro floppies I have
• Adding BBC Micro SSD/DSD/ADx image support to TC4Shell
• Getting a VPN client working on my Sophos UTM 9 firewall
• Planning content for the new viewdata.org.uk (but not yet writing any..)
• and watching some TV!  (Well, netflix..) Normally I hardly ever watch TV..

Each works for a bit, then I get distracted, interrupted, or just dispirited.  So I swap to something else. Right now, I don't feel up to doing any of them..  I've tried ignoring the news this evening, as there's not been anything new anyway.. but that's not helped either.

Strangely, Mr Biffo wrote a piece this week that resonated with me. It's one of the reasons I'm writing this... I was hoping it would help.

I'm not much of a sharer.. this is new to me,  So, I'm going to leave this here. If anyone wants to jump in help with any of those projects, feel free to get in touch.  Apart from watching Telly - the Mrs is happy to do that with me!

Stay safe, people.  Love you all.

Retrochallenge 2017/04

OK... after only a few years* hiding away, I've put myself in for this again.

I've set a much smaller goal this time; something I think I can achieve, instead of something I want to achieve!  This is, I think, an important difference.  I got nowhere the last two times, mostly because I was a bit too ambitious for the limited time available to me.  (I've only sort of partially achieved the "tidy the cable nest" of 2012, and never did get anywhere with the dial-up thing from 2013.)

So this year's goal:  Write something that will allow browsing a (static) viewdata database from a web browser for use with the new Wordpress-based viewdata.org.uk.  I have a browser already, but it's a bit clunky and not very easy to incorporate into anything else.  So a nice re-write is in order, whereby I can take advantage of "modern technologies" like javascript and AJAX calls, to make the effect more seamless, and I intend to "borrow" the code behind edit.tf and the teletext-browser version thereof to make things easier..

If I can do that, I might try and finish off enough of the new version of the website to actually launch it, but no promises!!


* - Four.

Home console for Total Television

Home Console for total television?

Our cover picture, this issue, demonstrates that home electronics of the future need not be stark and futuristic. It is the first actual physical representation of how television and sound of the future might well look in the sitting room of the relatively near future.

This two-part furniture-treatment in glowing rosewood, was presented for the first time ever by TV science pundit James Burke at a Radio Industries gathering in London on the eve of the start of his recent BBC series "Connections", in which he took an idiosyncratic look at the ways TV might be used in the future. The "home video and computer console" as it was described, has been produced by the Thorn Group under its Ferguson brand, to present how it thinks such a console to cover known and expected advances in home electronics might be developed.

The two modules, moving easily on castors, can be brought together as a unit of furniture, or separated for use individually in different parts of a room.

Lest this should be thought an idle flight of fancy, it should be recorded that a 180-page report from the USA has stated that what it calls IVTs (integrated video terminals) will emerge within the next four years. The report predicts that IVTs will be a billion-dollar industry within ten years. It even puts a price of $1400 (£700 or so) on such units in 1982. 

With typical transatlantic zest for new word pictures, the report (from International Resource Development Inc) says the expected strong consumer demand for interactive TV services will lead to the concept of "narrowcasting" as opposed to broadcasting.

The IVT is seen as being the primary home tool for: entertainment, publishing access, home environment scheduling, home admin (payment of bills etc), domestic appliance control, self education and correspondence via electronic mail services.

International Resource Development Inc put Japan ahead when it reported originally, in August last. But it said that the US had a "major opportunity for innovative breakthrough" for the second generation of IVTs.

The report sees the terminals selling through retail outlets initially, but as it "assumes a greater and greater role in the control of other appliances and as the centre of home life, education and correspondence as well as entertainment", it would become more like the motor car in marketing, with specialised dealer outlets.

It sees manufacture moving eventually away from the present home computer manufacturers, and possibly from the present TV makers too, to the "vertically integrated companies with solid-state computer and consumer manufacturing and sales experience"—companies like Texas Instruments and IBM are named as "likely candidates".

Key to the controls -

Starting from the left, the units contain: 

1 A display panel for digital time and  programme selection by LCD (liquid crystal display).

2 Drawer one, with removable remote control for TV programmes, teletext and viewdata operation. Also a
"vote "button by which, if cable TV is established, immediate response to questions asked in a TV studio can be accurately measured. This is already on test in the US.
3 Drawer two, a home video system — the all-electronic operation reduces the size from today's bulkier models.
4 Drawer three, has a floppy disc unit — computer memory store for instant information retrieval.
5 Drawer four, a stereo audio cassette unit with all-electronic function controls. Cassettes can also store
viewdata or other pulse-coded information.
6 A telephone handset moulded to match the cabinet. To be replaced, when available, by a videophone instrument.
7 Drawer five, a keyboard for home computer programming, advanced video games and viewdata messages, plus a print-out facility for messages or processed information.
8 A retractable small screen monitor for checking incoming or outgoing information to be processed by other elements of the console.

And, of course, the large wall-screen with monitor screens for showing other programmes, viewdata and teletext messages, or even pictures from in-house closed-circuit cameras for security or domestic needs.

First published in Viewdata and TV user, January 1979.

(Just think; you could do all that today on a mobile phone! Maybe I should do an emulator..)

Retrochallenge 2013

In a fit of madness, I decided to re-enter this years competition.

If you cast your mind back, I entered last time with the intention of sorting out my "man cave" as the attic was described, in order to get the viewdata BBS back up and running.

Unfortunately, building work interrupted matters, and I didn't get very far.   More unfortunately, the building work stalled, and I still don't have a safe floor up there, so pretty much everything is still in boxes.  A year on.  The tale of what happened and what went wrong is going to make a great story at some point, but not yet.

So, this year, I've been hoping to get something working under emulation.  The ideal would be an emulated modem that can answer VoIP phone calls, and pass the user to an emulated server of some sort.  Modems and VoIP are reckoned not to work very well, but that's the "modern" types. V23 has no problem at all, as I proved when using the real stuff over it.

The trick is going to get a software modem working at such a slow speed!  IAXmodem uses SpanDSP, which proports to support the old FSK modems, including V23, but I've not yet managed to get it working.  Part of the issue is that the whole thing is geared up for faxing, so assumes some level of intelligence from the far end.  V23 modems, particularly the 25 year old ones, don't do anything intelligent!

So, that's the task this month.  Getting iaxmodem (initially) to answer a call from an ancient terminal.  Then I'll hook it up to a BBC micro emulator and run the BBS entirely virtually.

I'm acutely concious that over half the month is over, and I've not done anything yet!

Long term goal is to find a backup of the original Prestel software and databases, run up a GEC mini-computer emulator, and actually run the real thing.  But so far that's been elusive.  Anybody know of any surviving discs or tapes from Prestel itself?

Nothing to report

It's been a busy few weeks. Kids broken up from school, house to tidy, and another week coming up where I have to completely box up and remove everything in the attic in order that the floor can be sorted out. I've already moved out a lot of stuff in there, but there's a heck of a pile remaining - mostly the stuff which wasn't already in conveniently sized stackable storage crates!  I've also had no end of other things to sort out that has been taking up an inordinate amount of time, plus all the trivial stuff that doesn't take long but seems to keep building up.  So lots of late nights and early mornings and which only makes me tired and slows me down further.

Throw in the odd random day out and this means, of course, that I've done virtually nothing on the retrochallenge entry - I keep promising myself a day on it, reworking the BBS side anyway, but it's not happened yet.  Maybe today ... there are still a couple of days of July left!  And then it can all go into boxes too...   On the plus side, when all the work is done, I'll be able to unbox it and set everything up much neater - but that won't be for another month or so at the very least, so outside the time limit.

Watch this space ...

Retrochallenge: Starting position..

The Attic

Well here we are.  My starting position at getting the viewdata BBS sorted out..

Top shelf - misc DIY stuff, but there's a spare electron shoved in there.

Middle shelf - two VoIP adapters & firewall, elderly modem rack, two terminal servers running off old PC power supplies since theirs died, and a NAS box and external USB drives that is nothing to do with this!

Bottom shelf - ancient mono monitor, three BBC Micros, two magic modems, quad-video switch.

On the floor: various spare beebs and ARM machines....

On the right, another two beebs, a Tandata viewdata adapter sat in a touchscreen for a CUB, atop a portable TV, and lots of more stuff!

At present, in use: one VoIP box adapter, the magic modems, and two beebs.

Out of shot is an Acorn A5000 which runs the econet fileserver and a RISC PC, sharing an old 14" monitor.

Previously, I did have two beebs on modems and two beebs connected to one of the terminal servers accepting calls from the internet, allowing four users but only two by each method.  The aim is to use the modem rack and terminal servers to answer the phones, with as many beebs as I can get working connected to other ports on the terminal servers. This will disassociate the link between access method and bbc micro, and allow more people to use the system.  Should they want to.  

At the moment I'm lucky to find even one person visiting ....

Anyway, I'm hoping I'll be able to tidy this lot up as well as getting it working again!  As you can see, it'll need it!

Retrochallenge

OK.. I'm going to try and get something done for Retrochallenge 2012 :-)

 I'm currently a year into a redesign of viewdata.org.uk, so will try and finish that.

 I'll also try mend a couple of machines and get the viewdata BBS connected back up to the Internet.
 (This is running on BBC Micros and Magic Modems from the 1980s - you can still telephone it ...)

 I might have to finish rebuilding the hobby room so I'll have space to do this...

Follow this specifically using the retrochallenge tag on this blog.

With luck, I'll at least get something part way done in the time.... :-)

Bandwidth theft and reciprocal links

I don't often pay close attention to my access logs; most traffic to my websites seems to be robots, but the other day, I was looking to see if a file over on viewdata.org.uk I had referred to in an email had been accessed, and spotted something strange going on.  An image of a Prestel welcome page had been accessed a few times, with a referrer elsewhere.

I accessed the referring page, and it turned out to be something pretty standard - a blog entry by somebody remembering Prestel, and how things used to be.  And there in the middle was my image, a 1987 Prestel signin page with my name (well, an alias I used) on it.  The page was appreciative of "volunteers and enthusiasts who raise the profile of the past" and linked to someone, not me, who did this.  A search of their website had no mentions of Prestel though, so I don't know why they were chosen to illustrate that point.  There was no mention of me, or my website, despite it being probably the only real resource documenting Prestel and other viewdata systems on the net.

Comments on the blog article seemed to be allowed, but required a site login, which I didn't have and was unable to create, so I sent the author an email instead.

Nice mention of Prestel. I'm one of those trying to preserve it's memory - it'd be nice if I'd been mentioned or linked through to, since you are including an image hosted by me - found you through the referrer logs! (I do have a T&C page that requests you don't do this without at least a link.)

I hope that's polite enough?   I have the policy simply because including external images is also referred to as "bandwidth theft" for good reason.  Any access to my website goes towards my account limits at both my DNS provider and webhost, and if I go over them, I have to upgrade my account, committing to pay out more money each month.  I don't mind if there's a chance that the person seeing the image, say, will follow a link and see what I have to say about things, find out more information, and perhaps realise that there really was online life Before The Internet, but I certainly wouldn't want to end up paying to provide images to illustrate an article diagrammatically opposing my own views, for instance.  (Not that it was in this case.)  All it takes is for an acknowledgement and a link to where you got the image from.  Heck, if you're writing about this stuff, you'd probably want to be linking to me anyway.

Anyway, I received no response.  Nada. Nothing.  However checking the blog post again, I see he's changed the image.  He now includes an image of a different welcome page (not one of mine) hosted over on A Limey in America's blog.  Nitecloak acknowledged it's source; our current writer didn't. Again.

I have a dilemma here.  On the one side, I want to encourage anybody who wants to to write about Prestel to do so, and to get their readers interested enough that should they come across anything relevant, that it's not immediately thrown away. On the other side, the bloke is obviously an arsehole who doesn't care for simple courtesy when it comes to using other people's content.  I guess he made up my mind for me by not even replying to my email, though.  Which is why I'm not even mentioning the website; I'm not going to do anything to send him readers.

Fun with terminals

Christmas bought me a little present -

It's a HOBS branded, Philips NMS 6302 viewdata terminal. Very dinky and sweet, and working perfectly! This is a pretty late model, built in 1990, compared to most of my other terminals. It says "Made in France" on the bottom, mentions Minitel, and therefore supports Teletel, Teletel Pad X3 and ASCII services too! Pity it's monochrome.. This would however be really cute to have on my desk, were I a high powered executive working in the 1990s...

As you might be able to tell, it's currently viewing the main Prestel Messaging index, page 7a. This is courtesy of my viewdata BBS, which it has given me a bit of incentive to try and get back online. (It's very very flakey at the moment but if you fancy tying it out, there's a single line sometimes-working on 03333 403311.. Key *Prestel# to jump out of the BBS and back in time, at least for a moment... ) I'm intending to re-work this in time, using the better modems and terminal servers to allow internet access too. It is, however, a wonderful trip down memory lane seeing these pages trickling down at 1200bps again!

Another Brick in the Wall

Wednesday was a big day for Tiddler - she was awarded a brick at the school assembly "for brilliant phonics work". They have an interesting rewards system - if you do really well at something, and it can be for something as minor as paying attention if you don't usually, you may be in line for a rectangle of paper with your name and the reason on it. This gets pasted up on the wall as you enter the main school building, for all to see. Arranged in a brick-wall pattern, of course, hence the name. She was very very giddy about this, and we were so pleased for her!


The phonics is letter sounds, incidentally. She knows more than they are currently teaching, and can give examples of words starting with the letters that they were amazed at! "Not the usual words we get"! We've got all the sheets pinned up on the doors, not that she seems to need them in order to identify the sounds.


In other news, I've finally got around to starting to get my head around php classes, and might even get the rewrite of Viewdata Viewer done. Not bad since I promised it nearly a year ago... I need that in order to do the database work for the Viewdata Website that is in turn needed in order to progress that to a much more interactive system.

Season's Greetings

Click to continue

Down again..

Sigh. Just a quick note to let people know that The BBS is down at the moment, at least for Telnet access. The Beebs are still going fine, but the somewhat younger iolan+ terminal server has died. I think it's a PSU problem, as it makes a ticking noise with a matching pulsing power LED. Unfortunately, it's a built in PSU, so it's going to take some time to get round to diagnosing and fixing that.

Farewell .....

As you will know by now, I was deeply involved with Prestel, Micronet 800 and other viewdata services back in the 1980s. I even worked for Micronet themselves between 1986 and 1988; that was by far the best job I ever had.

But a new wife, a new child, a new job and a new house took up most of my time, and money, and I'd pretty much dropped out of circulation by 1990.. As such, I completely missed the demise of Micronet until it was over, and never did catch up with most of the people I knew.

Twenty years later, with my life on another new course, and with some spare time, I'm trying to catch up! And I've been sent a pile of pages from the final days of Micronet. Reading all the farewells from the staff and members that I missed first time around has triggered so many fond memories. So many familiar names.

These will all be appearing up on viewdata.org.uk in due course. In the meantime, if any old 'netters want to say hi, please do so - either on this blog, or over at the forum.

Originally posted at blog.irrelevant.com.

Where are they now?

Or... probably more accurately, "do they know who they were?"

As part of my work on viewdata.org.uk I've also come across, and been sent, quite a few pages saved from the various teletext services about at the time. I've started putting these up on teletext.org.uk which, as yet, is really more of a dumping ground than anything informative.

Anyway, when looking through these things, one finds things like this:

This dates from about 1986. Guessing that the kids who contributed would have been about the 10yo mark, that puts them at about 34 now, give or take. I wonder if Maria, Marie, Mariam or Sian knew that their words would still be remembered a quarter of a century later.

Museum-quality finds!

Ever found something that a museum thinks could be worthy of preservation?

Ever find it in a museum?

This amused me somewhat!

After a heads up from a contributor about a surviving interactive demonstration of Prestel, I made some enquiries with the Science Museum in London. It turns out that yes, they have it, but apparently it "has not been placed on the Science Museum inventory". I read that to mean that it's not an exhibit as such, merely a display item, much like the introductions and signage you see all over the place. And as such, could be removed and destroyed at any time, as a similar item already has been! It might only be luck that it's still there..

I've voiced my concerns, and they are being raised with the appropriate people. In the meantime, I'm hoping for some technical data about it, and maybe a copy of the database. Let's try and preserve this!

Top 5 hit!

I've just discovered I had a hit with a programme I wrote! :)

Back in late 1986 I sold something called "The Beeb Editor" to Micronet for their telesoftware downloads. For my Viewdata site I've been processing the Autumn 1989 edition of LogOn magazine, sent out to all Micronet Members, and just discovered it was number 4 in the top BBC downloads. 3 years later. I obviously missed this first time around.

I've actually still got the contract in my file (in my mum's name, for some reason, but signed by me,) but I have not got a clue what the program actually was any more. I'll have to have a good search through my discs to find a copy and see.. Worse, I don't recall receiving any payments for it, either..