The Hubot robot, 1983. A 50 kilo robot with speech synthesis, radio, a built-in Atari 2600 and many other features. Not sure if the graphics are textmode, but it looks like it? via
Tag Archives: 1983
Genesis StoryTime was a videotex storybook that was broadcast in Canada and USA, 1983-1990. The Telidon graphics were converted to video and broadcast like a regular TV-channel, usually without sound. Images and video from Tedium.
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.
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.
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.