Obscure equipment I can say my TV License was spent on

[deejay]

So what happened when the end of the disc was reached? Did the symbol fade to black and then fade back in, or was there a jump as the laser returned to the beginning?

You mean with the looped globe?

That was long before my time I'm afraid, I assume that they just had to make sure they re-cued it before a junction

Precisely what happened, which is why you usually saw the same bit of the 1991 BBC 1 Globe! I can't remember how long the whole thing was but there was always a perceived danger in NC1 that you'd get the 'recue jump' on air. Law of sod and all that. The COW symbol looped entirely seamlessly, so this was never a problem. Many in Network saw it as something of a step backwards.

The Baloon symbols also first went to air from Laserdisc. Because there were so many of them they ahd to be recorded on both sides of the disc. If a director fancied using one from the other side of the disc, the engineer had to be despatched into the apparatus room to turn the disc over. All seems very low tech these days doesn't it!

BBC World and Prime were the last channels to use LaserDisc in their presentation control rooms. BBC Prime ditched their Laserdisc machine when the fireworks idents came in I think. BBC World continued a bit longer. The famed BBC World breakfiller used a laserdisc for the backgrounds and music as part of its setup until the 'Dynamic Junction' came in.

[marksi]

Our laserdisc globe didn't loop, it played for about 5 minutes from the time you started it, then stopped. Generally I started it just before the junction as then you were sure that it would still be running when it went to air. We had a Connolly controller unit that selected the appropriate timecode on the disc and cued it up, 12 positions for each channel. It was a complete nightmare to program when Christmas came round or any new idents were added and would generally misbehave for a week after you did anything with it, which is why we tried to avoid poking it too much. Eventually we couldn't get any more discs to record onto. Now and then we took the disc out of the machine and gave it a wash in sink in the gents loo next door.

[deejay]

I think World and Prime managed to get some of the very last laserdisc stock left in the country when they rebranded both channels in 1999. The fireworks set (actually called 'Festival') for BBC Prime and the excellent 1999 set for BBC World with David Lowe's music. I think Prime had two laserdiscs; can't remember if it was Learning Zone and stings on one, and Prime idents on the other or whether both discs had everything on. World certainly had two discs, though one was always for idents, stings and so-on and the other was always for the breakfiller backgrounds & music.

Anyway, what other 'obscure' kit can be claimed to be entirely license fee funded? Very early on in the thread someone posted a link to BBC R&D's website which has a very good (if brief) roundup of what they've been doing all these years. Ceefax, RDS, NICAM, FM radio, Colour TV etc all of which the BBC had a very string hand in developing. So I suppose all of those things along with the associated kit can be included in this thread!

There are tons of bits of BBC-only kit which you might or might not know about.

For example, VERA servers supplied regional sites with symbols and clocks for a long time. I don't think anyone still has them, though I know Bristol still used theirs in 2004. I don't know a great deal about them, but they had a front end very similar to the one I remember in NC1 and 2 for choosing which ident you wanted. I think they were PCs (maybe even Acorns).

BBC Vision Mixers were certainly unique and would be totally unfamiliar to virtually anyone working in television today. They looked more like sound desks than the banks of buttons associated with modern vision desks. Each channel had a fader associated with it and AIUI, the desk could be in cut or mix mode, and any number of sources could be added to the overall mix. Any mixed effect could then be cut off air to a single source by going back into cut mode and selecting a channel. All pretty clever. A classic example of a BBC design to acomplish a purpose, without the BBC referring to an external supplier to make something for them. I beleive BBC Vision Mixers were still in place in a few Television Centre studios as late as the early 90s. One of those would certainly be a great addition to this collection. It's the thing in the middle of this picture:

taken from the excellent TV Studio History site http://www.tvstudiohistory.co.uk/

[Inspector Sands]

BBC World and Prime were the last channels to use LaserDisc in their presentation control rooms. BBC Prime ditched their Laserdisc machine when the fireworks idents came in I think. BBC World continued a bit longer. The famed BBC World breakfiller used a laserdisc for the backgrounds and music as part of its setup until the 'Dynamic Junction' came in.

Yes, the laserdisc had different sets of backdrops for different combinations of headlines (sport, news, business etc) and the overlaid text came from BBC World's teletext service.

Amazed it worked as well as it did really

[deejay]

You could also try and get your hands on a RATS alarm (I think that's a BBC invention - it's essentially a Radio 4 Long Wave receiver connected to a box of tricks that triggers a flashing light and/or an audible alarm in newsrooms and radio/tv control suites to warn of a major news report). Can't remember what it actually stands for, but a lot of people in the Beeb call it "Royal About To Snuff".

There was also plenty of weird bespoke stuff in the old manual network presentation rooms: COW (Computer Originated World, mentioned already), GNAT (Generator of Network Analogue Time ... i.e. the clock), Big Ears (a slide scanner), NODDY (what did this stand for? I don't think it was so-called because the camera nodded up and down...

Taken from http://www.tvstudiohistory.co.uk/tv%20c ... y.htm#pres

[Steve in Pudsey]

The posh version of NODDY was "Nexus Orthicon Display Device", but the last time I saw this discussed I think the general concensus was that this is a backronym and was conjured up after the event to make NODDY sound a bit more technical - particularly as the camera wasn't nexus orthicon (whatever that means).

[marksi]

On the subject of laserdiscs, it turns out that Pioneer have just announced they're to stop making players.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/14 ... rmination/

You've got to wonder how many they've been selling.

[deejay]

Wow, I had no idea that Pioneer still made them!! I remember a large music/video shop selling the discs in the mid 1990s while I was at university. They had a fair number of titles ISTR but I'm not sure I saw their stock levels lessen much in the time I was a customer with them. It reminds me of Sony trudging on with Betamax when it was blantantly obvious that VHS had won the battle to be king of the formats. Didn't Sony even launch a S-VHS equivalent of domestic Betamax at one point?

Going back on topic, another bit of BBC equipment the VERA (Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus) videotape machine from the 1950s. This experimental (and frankly scary) machine used steel tape travelling at 200 inches per second (I think that's nearly 70 feet per second!!!) between two 21 inch spools. Each tape lasted just 15 minutes. I wouldn't have liked to have been the operator who had to stand anywhere near the thing.

Although the BBC demonstrated VERA in 1956, Ampex launched their 2" magnetic tape VTR in 1958 in the UK and the rest as they say...

[marksi]

My favourite piece of BBC-related equipment from history can been seen at the Science Museum in London. It's about 10 feet long and 6 feet high. It looks like a terribly complicated machine.

It produced the pips.

[Nick Harvey]

Whenever I see a machine that looks remotely like that, I can't help thinking of a Dalek saying "Bollocks".

Did anyone else see that particular Christmas tape?

[Inspector Sands]

Wow, I had no idea that Pioneer still made them!! I remember a large music/video shop selling the discs in the mid 1990s while I was at university. They had a fair number of titles ISTR but I'm not sure I saw their stock levels lessen much in the time I was a customer with them. It reminds me of Sony trudging on with Betamax when it was blantantly obvious that VHS had won the battle to be king of the formats. Didn't Sony even launch a S-VHS equivalent of domestic Betamax at one point?

It ended up turning it into the broadcast industry standard tape format - Betacam, followed by Beta SP, Digibeta etc right up to the HDCAM tapes of today (they dropped the 'Beta' name for HD for some reason, I suppose BetaHD does sound a bit odd!)

The opposite happened with Panasonic and their M and MII format (and later D3) which evolved from VHS but were never as widely used as the Beta derivatives.