Tomorrow's World - Computer program transmitted over TV 

In the 80's they didn't believe in backgrounds

2:37 You know your audience is above average when you actually have to tell them not to open up their TVs and dismantle the speaker wires.

This is going to change everything.

James May's long lost twin?

Later experiments for the BBC Micro worked, as did transferring via the Teletext adaptor (if you could afford one). ITV also had a system with a little flickering square in the corner of the picture, transferred via a simple phototransistor circuit (that also worked as a light pen). It was exciting at the time!

I love the part where they say if you have a different system try it anyway. Bwahahahaha!!!

I actually tried this when it was first broadcast. I had a Sinclair ZX81 and held a mono cassette recorder up to the TV speaker to record it. No, it didn't work! The signal to noise ratio would have been appauling. I did manage to share a very short ZX Spectrum program over FM CB radio 'though, about a year later, with my friend who lived a few miles away :-D

I wrote the code to do the BBC Micro demo in this show ! I was working at Acornsoft at the time (and also living rent free by being a guinea pig a diet drug experiment at Addenbrooke's in Cambridge. Acorn had won the BBC Micro contract and the Tomorrow World show was going to plug the new machine. I drove down with machines (they were rare pre-production prototypes) and met at one of the producers house in London. He explained what the demo was going to be a I wrote the code "Graphics" and then put up lots of boring numbers. We set up the machines in the studio the next day and lots of people had fun playing with them. But the show was live and once they turned on all the lights (and running all day with people poking at them) the machines all crashed. Super stressful ... so as the the show music started up I had to turn off all the BBC Micro machines... let them cool down and then reboot them just in time for the live demo. Luckily they worked ok just in time. I moved to USA in 1989 and explained years later to my daughters B and E (then aged about 8 and 6) "In the 1980's I was young rich and famous" - E - "But Dad if you were famous where are all your fans ?" - B - "They are all dead"

For anybody saying that only one program was transmitted, no, there were two. The first was for the Apple II, and the second was for the ZX-81. You can hear the change in the data speed at 3:14, and you can also see a splice go through the tape machine where they've deliberately removed almost any pause between the two different programs.

I just love the black background just like on the old computers.

Those people..There are 100 Computers for every human on this planet today.

I love the fact that the BBC’s ban on advertising and mentioning brand names meant that they didn’t say which two computers they were using. It caused confusion because the Apple II and ZX81weren’t compatible in any way. They failed to mention that there were two sets of code. I managed to get it to work on my ZX81 but not until a lot of trial and error with volume and tone controls, months after the broadcast. I don’t know why I bothered as I knew how little the program did. After this, the BBC did broadcast a very limited selection of software via Ceefax and on (I think) AM radio.

"It says error but it's even misspelt that"

I love watching these.lol.it makes me feel like I'm from the future..I. d love to go back and tell them how computers are doing now...x

....."have you tried turning it off and on again?"

I did this in my 'pirate' days on FM. My classmates recorded it and were able to play C64 games!

That sexy reel to reel action

So I just recorded this to my mac with Audacity, looked at the waveform, and looked at the spec for the Apple ][ and zx81 case ports. Looking at the waveform, I see what pretty obviously look like different peaks for 0 and 1, and what appear to be two different bit rates. From the specs, I think they have both programs here... the first tone is Apple’s 770 Hz tone in ‘chirps’ of 650 microseconds, followed by almost 3 seconds of Apple data. Then a 10th second of silence, followed by almost 10 seconds of zx-81 data. Apples cassette was 1333 bps, while the zx-81 was 250 bps, so it makes sense a simpler program would take ~3x longer to transmit. Sadly, I think RU-vid’s audio compression may have made this unreadable. I’m still poking around though... since we know part of the message that was displayed on screen, we would be able to convert part of it to bits and see if we can find it in the bitstream. I’m thinking this may havactually worked on both machines! The Apple][ would ignore everything after a successful load, and the zx-81 May have ignored the faster Apple chatter that came before.

And remember to keep very quiet you don't won't any background noise, he he

I don't have a betamax machine either, But I do have a couple of VHS players, A friend of mine bought the Philips laser disc player, When it first came out, And another friend of mine bought a Philips, Video 2000 with its reversible tapes.

This is much more practical in today's world, when we can Chromecast youtube to our TVs and record onto tape from there at leisure. ;-)

hahaha oh the gorgeous modem sounds!

The most hilarious thing is they were doing this experiment after the introduction of texetext (cfax).

when internet didn't exist worldwide yet

If anyone has a Micro or ZX machine they should try this!

Did anyone here try to extract the program from this video?

They didn't give people a whole lot of time to prepare

Wow the futures looking great🤣🤣

I am sure I remember doing this with my new ZX81, As I always watched TW.

This is actually not quite as simple to do as it sounds. Essentially those home computer tape systems were based on the idea that you can record impulses onto the tape. For this your transmission line needs to have a linear phase response, meaning that all the frequencies have the same delay. This is not very important for normal audio as, except for extreme conditions, you won't hear such a problem. This is also why some expensive tape recorders had problems with computer data. They traded linear phase for a better frequency response which gives an overall better sound. There were multiple ways to work around this problem. The one used in Germany was to filter the signal in a way so it would be based on a sine wave. This is done by filtering out all harmonics of the signal. In the GDR they transmitted their signal via FM-stereo with one channel having the direct audio, and the other one having it attenuated by 20 dB. This causes the signal to be present twice in the stereo multiplex.

Well it only sounded to me like they transmitted one file, there was only one set of pilot tones. So my guess is, Kieran only played the ZX81 version, they tried to load it into the Apple II, predictably failing. I don't know why they didn't have both computers set up to try simultaneously.

The first form of "WiFi" internet....

A ZX-81 computer, my dad had one of those it was our first computer.

"War Games" 1983! Talking computer!

they use the same system on siri now on iPhones lol

Yeah nice

I don’t see these ‘computer’ things catching on.

😃😃😃👍

Anyone else thinks that girl was really cute?

Anybody knows if the program can be decoded with some digital modem program like Fldigi or other ham modem software, thanks!

Hello fellow humans I am not a computer program sent over TV.

Is it weird if I want a pc from the 80's more than one with a core i3

They don't give the viewer very much time to set up the recorder.

... and that's how dubstep was born

witchcraft. they will never catch on 😆

1 Cassete = 1KB

Computers, cassettes, all this new tech. Will never catch on. Next you'll say we will be using touch screens and that cars will be electric, haaa Haa Haa. Never

You really had to put a lot of effort in to get a computer virus in those days.

Is this SSTV? Couldn't decode it

But will it play crysis?

ERRERR

And this one gives you VAT........ Very boring

They even taped there lies lol