Telidon graphics by John Vaughan for the PBS-station WETA, 1981. He created them with a Norpak Frame Creation Terminal.
Tag Archives: 1980s
MAXHEAD2, a Max Headroom ANSI animation with speech synthesis from 1986. Executable available here. Unknown author.
via the excellent ulan-bator.tumblr.com.
Cefucom 21 is an educational, electro-mechanical multimedia computer from Japan, 1983. Or a “multipurpose SLAP computer”, as they call it. While it looks like a screen on the left, that is actually just transparent plastic. Inside, you put “capsules” with pages, and the computer controls which page is displayed. The cassette player is used for playing audio, and for data storage.
Cefucom seems to be based on Sanyo’s PHC-25 that has a 32×16 or 16×16 textmode, so you can have a big font to display Japanese characters decently.
Glenn Howarth’s workstation for Telidon graphics, which he made 1981-1985. The photo is from the book Machine stitched into a corner of the Canadian modern age flag: Glenn Howarth’s Telidon art (pdf) that has plenty of Howarth’s not so text graphics. It was written by John Dorno, who has been researching and restoring Telidon art for years.
Learn more about Telidon
Microtex 666 (1986-1989) was a videotex service on the Australian network Viatel, where it was the only service to cater specifically to computer users in 1986. It featured telesoftware (downloadable software for free or at a cost), lists of BBSs (not on videotex), programming resources, the turnbased multiplayer game Great Galactic Conflict (updated weekly) and a bulletin board called Blackboard. While other Viatel boards were apparently moderated by hand, Microtex automatically removed obscenities and updated the pages every 15 minutes during peak hours.
The brand was also used for a hardware/software bundle for dial-up services (videotex, BBS, etc). C64, DOS, Apple II and BBC Micro were supported.
Source: Viatel Directory and Magazine Vol 4, 1986.
Time Teletext was a US teletext service, 1981-1983. Compared to common British teletext, Time offered smooth vector graphics with the NAPLPS-standard (common in American videotex). Time used satellite and cabe cable, so it had more pages and a better frame than other teletext. That paved the way for teletext games sucha as Dire Straits and Outer Space Zoo. The games turned out to be more popular than the news, which was not what Time was hoping for with their $25,000,000+ investment…
This looks like a great keyboard for text graphics. There are dedicated keys for switching character sets, choosing and defining colours, manipulating fonts (DCRS), etc. Towards the top right, it looks like a dedicated set of keys for “pixeling” on a sub-char level?
This is the TBT-03 keyboard by Loewe, for the MCT 26 television. Circa 1984. It is used for the German videotex format BTX (and possibly other similar CEPT-standards like the Mupid?). Found here. Also see the TBT-02 keyboard
By Karl Kempton and Loris Essary. Selections from WIRED, made with typewriter and letraset 1985-1986, according to RENEGADE.
Other Kempton works here.
Portrait of Jurriaan Schrofer made in 1987 by Total Design, using a font and script that Schroder made in the 1970’s. It achieves this effect not by changing the text characters, as ASCII-converters usually do, but by changing the weight of the type. More info.
Image from Frederike Huygen’s biography Jurriaan Schrofer from 2013.