Computing in 1982 - August

The August 1982 issue of Your Computer contained all the latest from the world of ZX, BBC and Vic computers, as well as the new releases to the market.


However, the first thing which caught my attention was the editorial piece about networking. Some felt that networking computers was becoming pointless, as the main reason for doing this was to allow sharing of often expensive peripheral devices. However, the march of technology meant that these were becoming cheaper all the time, and so this networking would become unnecessary.

Not so, said the piece, as networks should now become larger scale, enabling communication between remotely located machines. This in turn would open up access to remote databases, with Sinclair suggesting that in future its software would be downloaded directly from a remote Sinclair database.

In describing the future for networking of computers, this piece was absolutely spot on.

London 2012 Recorded in Super Hi-Vision 8K HD

I was in London for the Men's Marathon, one of the last events of the Olympic games, and fortunately was early enough to secure a good spot near St Paul's Cathedral.

As the athletes ran 3 laps of a course through the city's streets, there was plenty of time to become accustomed to proceedings. First, the "Forward Command Vehicle" drove through, with another car close behind. Then, after a slight interval, the media truck with the official timing display.

Behind that, however, and slightly ahead of the athletes and their camera bike entourage, was another vehicle, carrying some rather interesting equipment, and on one of the passes I managed to see a logo "Super Hi-Vision" and remembered that there was a plan to record and broadcast in 8K High Definition.

I was lucky enough to see examples of the future of High Definition at Essex University a couple of years ago. On the third lap, I managed to catch the vehicle on a video I took of the leaders running through.

Currently, our HD TVs at home have a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, which is referred to as "2K". 8K HD has a resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels. The Olympics project is a joint venture between the BBC and NHK.





You can find out more about these developments and how the future of TV might evolve on the BBC R&D Blog (including a great picture of Super Hi-Vision installed in the Broadcasting House Radio Theatre), and in these articles on Pocket-lint and techradar.

LinkedIn Usage Trends

Over the past month, my LinkedIn network has grown by about 5% so I thought I'd run a quick query over the data I've accumulated to see if there's much in the way of change in habits since last time.

The short answer is no, but looking a bit deeper, a slightly higher percentage of the network creating shares does indicate some increased activity, so it'll be interesting to see if this trend continues over the coming months.

In the meantime you can find out more about the chart above here.