A nice short low key video on an institution - the Computer Graphics Workshop and the BBC Weather programmes.
Featuring Macintosh XL, VAX 11/750, VT100, Quantel, and more.
CGW Experimental Man Machine Interface (7 mins)
Narrated by Bill Gardner, formerly manager of the CGW.
Interesting that the graphics are produced and mixed in full colour for broadcast, but also are seen by the overlaid presenter in blue-only, and also shown to the presenter by teleprompt.
I particularly like the UX for the weather maps on the Macintosh XLs. Nice find!
via a post on discord by Adrian Wilson, â1980s Paintbox artist, historian and curatorâ - who has an extensive paintbox site:
Technology âThe 1981 Quantel Paintbox was years ahead of the competitionâ
History âthe fundamental challenge was to create a system which could âpaintâ a digital line that replicated the subtleties and speed of a real painted lineâ
In 1980, the computational limitation of available hardware was a big issue to overcome. The huge, state of the art hard drive was only 330Mb, so the real-time complex processing had to be spread over 25 circuit boards, custom made by Quantel and each containing over a dozen specially programmed chips.
Most Paintboxes were left running continuously, with The Weather Channel stating in 1990 that, except for a few minutes to install software upgrades, they hadnât turned off their 1982 Paintbox for 8 years!
Possibly originally powered by LSI-11 and later by 68000?
An impressive site, indeed.
Mind that this doesnât work in Mozilla Firefox (the image map for the site navigation doesnât work), so please use an other browser.
