Sunday, September 10, 2006

IBA Tech Report from 1970

After writing about the new Tek WFM7100 last Friday I came across this brilliant document - it is the Chief Engineer's report to the IBA board and contains lots of info about the state of broadcast technology thirty-five years ago. There is a description of how they were upgrading the ITV network for colour and how the use of twin-lense telecines were taking off - Mk.1 Cintels I'm assuming - the Mk.2 was either a jump-scan or "digi-scan" depending on vintage (we had a few of those in TV news at the Beeb - I was quite a dab-hand at repairing the memory boards). Automated measurement using Vax PDP-series mini-computers is examined as well and serves as another parallel with the Tek. This picture shows how they did screen-grabs back then - using a polaroid camera mount!
Anyhow - give it a read - I was gratified to see how much of it tied in with what I learnt at BBC Evesham in the late eighties. It is a big 12-meg PDF but worth the download.

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