Vinyl Data- Classic Computers / Indie music tricks crossover

[Jules Richardson]

Tony Duell wrote:
> You bought (at least in the UK) a cassette where side 1 cotnained 
> machine-specific traslator/subrotuing programs -- for the PET, BBC Micro, 
> TRS-80, etc, Siee 2 contained various demo programs in Basicode. You 
> lioaded the appropriate translator for your machine and could then load a 
> Basicode program (either from side 2 of the tape or one you'd recorded 
> off the radio).

Indeed - I had one of those tapes, although I'm not sure if I still do; I 
think I may have parked it at Bletchley before I left the UK. Somewhere I 
still have an Acorn doc related to their implementation of the standard.

Now, there was also a brief move to transmit data via TV for home computers in 
the UK (as mentioned by others for other countries) - I can't for the life of 
me remember what that was called, as I think it was something other than 
Basicode. (My brain wants to say it transmitted as part of the Teletext signal 
for use with the various Teletext adapters - Morley, Acorn etc. - but I'm not 
certain). I do have some documentation on it, but of course it's stuck in 
storage 4000 miles away :-(

> I also believe that some programs for the BBC micro were transmitted as 
> pages on the BBC's (TV company) teletext system -- probably pages with 
> hex digits in the page number, whioch could not be displayed on most TVs. 

Gaaah, read entire message before typing, Jules :-)

Hopefully someone has a name for it, though.

> There were at least 2 teletext decoders that connected to the BBC micro

I think someone - possibly Morley - did one for the Spectrum, too.

cheers

J.