Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video](youtube.com) |
Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video](youtube.com) |
Since 1958 and over 5,000 episodes!
(so much of classic UK TV is either "has been broadcasting since the dawn of television in a largely unchanged format" or the other extreme of "we only ever made six episodes back in the 1970s and they are etched across everyone's childhood")
Or alternatively sometimes scarred for life :)
And if taking a trip back through 1970's UK TV is something anyone's interested in then this is a fun book:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/stephen-brotherstone-dave-lawrence...
It's the artistic equivalent of Step 1: take these household materials, Step 2: ???, Step 3: Profit!
- strobing CRT monitors that don't line up with the frequency of the TV camera
- PCs in the internet cafe, Macs in media, Acorn Archimedes (with ARM processor!) in schools
- first thing to do with the global communications network is send a dumb message to the US President
- indexed-color images; you can see in one case when she changes windows and the colours go wrong in the background as the palette is swapped.
- very early HTML without even a DOCTYPE
- "all secondary schools are to be linked to the internet by the end of the year" (I would put money on that not having happened for several more years)
I think that back then, you'd often host your own site. Or at least, write most of it in HTML.
It was mostly your content, and maybe if on geocities or something, a few ads around the edges.
Now, it's 280 chars surrounded by a whole page of, what is realistically, ads or 'not you' content.
Content is broken up, piecemeal, not one.
While you can setup a singular resource, it's more rare for people to do.
Many old pages were just a text menu on the left "birds", "my dog", "the month I spent travelling", and then deep content.
Now you get mostly reactionary fluff "Can you believe the horrible thing I read!!!"
Could be worth checking the mirror there.
Yes they can, all they need to do is stump up for the licenses the same as the BBC do via organisations such as the PRS:
https://www.prsformusic.com/licences/broadcasting-music-on-t...
https://www.bbc.com/academy-guides/music-copyright-in-tv-wha...
Project Code Rush
Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape's last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31 1998, and the impact on the engineers' lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.
The BBC has had to do various work to keep the archives accessible, mid-90s stuff like this was probably recorded on D3 digital composite tape, but that's now long obsolete, so has to be transferred to modern formats (nowadays as files on LTO tape AFAIK). AFAIK stuff on 2" quad (the first practical video tape format, used from the 1950s to early 80s) has been transferred at least twice, from quad to D3 or DigiBeta, then to files.
[1] The title of the "showrunner" of Blue Peter, so in the meaning of "editor of a newspaper", not "videotape editor".
I studied Broadcast Engineering for my degree back in 1997, and you could definitely shift the input signal to match the refresh rate of a CRT screen or a flourescent tube light on the Sony BetaCam TV studio cameras I worked with. I reckon the BBC would have been working with similar or better tech in 1995. I wonder if this might have been a directorial choice to show what viewers expect rather than any technical issue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array#Technical...
And then on the school end, they might have had a lab of computers, but 1) probably Acorn Archimedes at best and 2) probably on an econet rather than Ethernet LAN if networked at all; so getting those computers ‘linked up’ to the internet was going to be tricky.
So your ‘linked to the internet’ school would more likely be one PC in an office on dialup to an ISP for email.
Or maybe a simple webpage hosted by a friendly local university?
For me that also was about the first website I visited back around that time when I had friends over, who didn't know Internet to show how easy you can get there from Europe.
Second stop was the local city councils page, and checking why my physics teacher was supporting for proposals as counselor.
The BBC brand guidelines would never have allowed an ad to appear, though.
Heck, I was about to joke about cookie banners not being a thing -- but they sort of were, as they had just been invented (1994 [1]), and any site which relied on them inevitably had some prominent text exhorting you to use a browser which supported them (whether you already were or not). (Or frames -- the very first web page I visited -- nintendo.com -- I was greeted with Cranky Kong lecturing me about frame support.) This was of course right next to the ubiquitous "best viewed in Netscape Navigator / Internet Explorer" badge.
Oh and don't forget the toolbar plugins. Anyone from the cohort for whom the phrase "eternal September" was invented to describe had between 3-7 of these in their browser, each one taking up another half inch of real estate. So top to bottom you'd have:
* title bar
* menu bar
* (enormous) navigation bar
* bookmark toolbar
* AOL toolbar
* Yahoo! toolbar
* Ask Jeeves toolbar
* Bonzi Buddy toolbar or some other spyware
* anti-spyware toolbar
* web page
* horizontal scroll bar
* status bar
* Windows dock
And the web page itself was often divided up into multiple frames (for ads or navigation or just by accident), each with their own scroll bars because they'd be just a pixel too large to fit in their allotted space. Probably only a 1/4 of the full screen real estate would actually show content.
(This doesn't always follow, of course. The UK version of The Office is only 12 regular episodes plus a couple of specials, yet it's impact is still very much felt - at least in the UK - so I don't necessarily see there being a simple correlation between quantity of material and cultural significance. As much as the US series is also excellent I don't think it carries quite the same iconic status or cultural weight here even though there are a lot more episodes - obviously it might do in the US.)
W and I cannot stress this enough AT?!!!!!!
We had multiple re-runs of it in the 90s in various post-Soviet countries.
Look at the news. The headlines. Entirely designed to create a reaction, to drive reaction, often entirely misrepresenting the contents of the article itself.
And news content has changed dramatically. It's all keyed to drive 'reactionary fluff' responses, so that it spreads. On Twitter. On Facebook. Via Google search.
And this is the biggest part of Twitter, Facebook. It drives clicks. It drives engagement. And by far?
If you look at sheer numbers, of what people do on the internet? It's engaging in this.
Even this site, is siloed into that model ... discussion most often about an external page. Now, this site attempts to reduce reactionary fluff, but it quite often leaks in, both through the story contents, and with people not even reading the article, just the headline.
If you take away porn, and all the SEO spam pages, and all the clone pages which use algos to clone content and just pimp ads, what does the average person use the internet for?
"Reactionary fluff" is apt.