Tag Archives: 1983

Ad for the Scanset XL terminal in BYTE Magazine, 1983. h/t: Tim Koch

ExtraVision was an American teletext service on CBS, 1983-1988. It didn’t use the British WST teletext standard, but the French Antiope, which was eventually swallowed by the American NABTS standard.***

ExtraVision was featured in the book Teletext: Its Promise and Demise by Leonard R. Graziplene. Image from here.

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.

More: here, here, here, here.

Computer Poetry by Silvestre Pestana, consists of three poems. Computer Poetry To: E. Melo e Castro (ZX81, 1981), Computer Poetry To: Henry Chopin (ZX81, 1981), Computer Poetry To: Julian Beck (ZX Spectrum, 1983).

Here is the third one in action, running on a ZX Spectrum emulator, courtesy of oficinastk.

The work was also featured in a more recent exhibition by the artist (techno-form, 2016).

Read more here.

The font of the portable TRS-80 Model 100 (1983).

WarGames (1983) uses what looks like a custom font to display thermonuclear text mode graphics. It was made on a CompuPro 8/16, although an IMSAI 8080 is used in the movie (apparently for sale for $25,000). Read more, see more.

PETSCII comic from 1983, made on a Vic-20. “The first Finnish comic made on a computer”. Published in Sarjari, issue 9, 1983. Posted by Skrolli here, h/t Markku Reunanen.

Kawasaki Synthesizer for C64, made by the Japanese jazz musician Ryo Kawasaki in 1983. Graphics partly made in petscii.

PlayNET was an American online system for Commodore 64, launched in 1983. It used PETSCII and pixel graphics. It was bought by QuantumLink, who later turned into AOL. 

h/t: Tim Koch

The Galaksija computer and the graphics part of its character set. Designed by Voja Antonic in Yugoslavia, 1983. Screenshots from games and an adaptation of the classic Dancing Demon animation.

Also check µGalaksija, a single-chip remake of the Galaksija.