Byte Back II - The Doomsday Project

imnogeek

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Byte Back had a more serious side to it in the shape of the Doomsday Project,

From memory, the story goes that this chap found a BBC Master and a laser disc player in a school store room... the Doomsday Project and from then on they have tried to restore it.

Here's a quick summary

Peter Armstrong was 20 years a film maker and Head of Department at the BBC. He set up the BBC's Interactive Unit to make educational multimedia. In 1983, Armstrong wondered if it would be possible to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book by producing a modern day equivalent. It was an ambitious idea, but it captured the imagination. It was planned that the first copy would be given to Prince William, the "poetic successor to William the Conqueror".

Funding for the project - an estimated budget of £2million - was relatively easy to source. Multimedia was an exciting, upcoming technology; people involved in education, national archiving as well as computing were keen to push it forward. The BBC put together a team of around 60 staff to develop the project and recruited pupils from over half of all the schools in the country to help produce the content. In all, around a million children were involved from 14,000 schools.
http://www.iconbar.com/forums/viewthread.php?newsid=937

... from what I remember talking to him the BBC Master had SCSI added to it which was the means of connecting the laser disc player. These laser discs are quite heavy and when warp a little when in use so the player has a sensor to correct the read height of the laser which at the moment is a little temperamental.

Anyhow I'm sure there are people on this forum that are far more knowledgable about the project and will add more.

Here are a couple of pics of the kit which he kindly opened up to see it running in the nude :) (oh dear, I am GEEKy ain't I)
 

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Re: Byte Back II - The Doomsday Project

@Imnogeek


Brilliant, fantastic, Best hardware pr0n in ages

The sandwich board on top of the Master's main PCB is the 65C102 co-processor board, which gave an extra 64KB of RAM as well as the 4MHz full speed processor (total 192KB RAM).

In effect this setup without the SCSI addon on the left hand side is refered to as the Master Turbo... And guess who has one in mint condition. :wink:

The SCSI board was serviced by a LDV filing system ROM inserted into one of the spare sideways ROMS sockets.

The Master's output (TTL RGB) was fed into a primitive Genlock which was then superimposed onto the Video being output from the LaserDiscs and the combined outputs (overlayed) were fed into a monitor, quite a complex setup but it worked well.

I bet Prince William doesn't still have his system though, probably flogged it on egay. :LOL:

Thanks for the pics G, nice to see some Acorns here on Amibay, now where's the CPC Doomsday System :LOL:

TC :mrgreen:
 
Re: Byte Back II - The Doomsday Project

TheCorfiot said:
The Master's output (TTL RGB) was fed into a primitive Genlock which was then superimposed onto the Video being output from the LaserDiscs and the combined outputs (overlayed) were fed into a monitor, quite a complex setup but it worked well.

@TC
Slightly OT

When I ifrst started filming in 1986 I used a BBC B to create the titles and credits with the use of a genlock. They were nearly going to be in B&W but shortly before I finished my first film I discovered the jumper to get colour output :oops:

A couple of years after that I bought my first Amiga - a 2000HD - cost me a bluddy fortune :roll:

That served me well until I towered my 1200. As well as having a system that would control my video recorders, panasonic effects deck and CD player all run by a basic 500.

Then moved onto the Classic Casablanca which give me a non-linear editing system on a linear medium :wink:

And now I only use the P**Y PC :oops:

Dave G 8)
 
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