Tag Archives: 1980s

Telidon/NAPLPS ads created for Bank of America (1982) by John Vaughan at The Communication Studio. More examples on his Youtube channel. In 2019 he posted more graphics and info on his blog.

Teletext graphics by Richard Gingras, 1980. This service was called Now and ran on KCET-TV. It was part of a collaboration between CBS, NBC and PBS to test the French Antiope standard for teletext. The project was supported by Télédiffusion de France.

Images from Gingras’ website, which is only partly archived on archive.org. There’s an interview with Gingras about his teletext work here.

Post updated 2024.

obsessionmps:

Toxic Wastes from A to Z (coming after you and me) by John Fekner is a parody of a children’s alphabet learning aid which runs alphabetically through a list of toxic pollutants. Martin Nisenholtz invites John Fekner, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and others to experiment with an early interactive computer graphics system (Telidon) at New York University’s Alternate Media Center (Interactive Telecommunications Program). Fekner received his first international award at Toronto’s Video Culture Festival in the Videotex category.

SCOOP was a teletext magazine for teenagers, available at ten high schools in USA, 1985. It was broadcasted on WGBH-TV in Boston using the NABTS/NAPLPS standards, which included the alpha-mosaic features of the French Antiope standard (see page 12).

“The kind of information presented (topical subjects, sports scores, around town information, etc.), the way it was presented (short, tightly edited segments), and the format (contemporary, graphic-heavy, easy to access) were appropriate to a teenage audience.”

More info in Formative Evaluation for Educational Technologies. Post updated in 2024.

Reabracadabra by Eduardo Kac, 1985. Visual poem made for the Brazilian videotex service Videotexto, which was based on Minitel. I wrote about this work for Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology.

A mobile phone version was made in 2003. Post updated in 2024.

Simon Ekstrand, Text mode 40 x 24 monochrome Teletext, 78 x 75 block graphics made on the ABC80 computer in the 80s.

An introduction to ABC80, the Swedish answer to the TRS-80. It was built by the government-owned Luxor, and had a textmode that supported monochrome teletext, like you can see in the video. As a bonus, here is a video of a guy browsing the web with the ABC80.

Commodore 64 demonstration of a nuclear power plant, written by Derek Lee.

Primiti Too Taa by Ed Ackerman and Colin Morton, 1987. More details on Wikipedia.

More typewriter animations

After Weeks and Weeks in the Intensive Care Unit by Shaunt Basmajian, 1989. He was stabbed while driving a taxi, and according to this Wikipedia page he died the year after from complications. But the page states that he was stabbed in 1986…