Live Via Satellite

markhb writes "40 years ago today, the first trans-Atlantic TV transmission made it out of the Maine woods and into history, via the original Telstar. The IEEE and Lucent plan to commemorate the event at three events today in Pleumeur-Bodou, France, Goonhilly Downs, England, and Andover, Maine."

Goonhilly

[andyr]

Visited Goonhilly some time ago. It has a number of dishes now - from the very old ones, the biggest, to the new ones. The old ones had to track small, weak satellites in low earth orbit, and consequently had a large diameter and had to slew fast.

The newer ones are smaller, and often fixed, pointing to satellites in geo-stationary orbit.

There there are a pair of microwave dishes (in and out?) that look small, but carry all the terrestrial traffic to/from Goonhilly.

At the time (12 years ago ?) Goonhilly carried almost all Europes transatlantic traffic.

Cheers, Andy!

Re:Blair Witch Project ame from there too...

[Budgreen]

well. No

The blair witch came from Burkittsville Maryland, about 10mi from where I live.. and as for woods there's not much there but a small park and the appliachian(sp) trail. all they really filmed from there was the cemetary AFAIK.

just a little high town with some farms, I went there and didn't see any witch... so dissapointed

When I was but a lad....

[Russ Nelson]

When I was but a lad, we used to vacation in Rangeley Lakes, ME. My father (who worked for AT&T at the time) took the family over to Andover to see the ground station. I remember it as being this fantastically huge globe with a microwave transmitter inside it.

Also, I remember my father taking us outside of our home on Long Island to see Telstar going overhead. Nowadays, you can see satellites just by looking up and waiting ten or fifteen minutes.
-russ

Beatles were more memorable

[alext]

The first worldwide TV program was 5 years later (June 25, 1967) - the Beatles in their Magical Mystery Tour mode doing "All You Need is Love." Covered 24 countries, 5 continents via Echo II (?) a satellite which had no transmitter, just a reflector.

I'm sure some worthy celebs would like to commemorate this event - how about it Sir Paul/Mick?

(Unfortunately, though alive I think I was probably tuned to Listen with Mother [whirligig-tv.co.uk] instead :( )

Re:Technology has come a long way.

[renehollan]

Lesse, what do you take for granted that didn't exist for me, a child of the 60s (I'm presuming here that by child of the xx's, you mean someone born in the early part of the xx decade -- in some contexts "child" in that phrase refers to an adolescent and not "under 10").

0. ATMs and "multi-branch banking": no longer did you have to go to your branch to make deposits and withdrawls, nor did you have to deal with a human teller.

1. VCRs: they didn't start getting popular until about 1979-1981, and cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars. Do you remember the VHS vs. Beta format wars?

2. Compact Disks: radio stations started using them instead of records, calling them "laser disks" (not to be confused with video laser disks), and making a big deal of the quality (over well-worn vinyl). The first ones were around $3000. By 1986, you could get a portable for around $200.

3. Cellular phones: about the size of a brick, access was available in few metropolitan areas. They first started to be used in cars, because of their bulk, replacing older-style "mobile phones", that were essentially radios.

4. Pocket calculators. We got to use slide-rules in science class: pocket calculators were considered an unfair advantage for those students who could afford $150 for four functions and square root.

5. Computers: the hobbyist Altair became available, with an 8080 CPU, and was featured in a January 1975 Popular Electronics article. The Apple ][, and a host of CP/M-based machines followed. As this is a geek forum, I'll dwell a bit on the pre-history of 1975-1981. The Altairs (and IMSAIs) were big, boxy, noisy, and expensive: I remember 256 bytes of memory costing $119. The 2102 1kbit static ram was a breakthrough: 8 kilobytes could fit on an S100 card (for the Altair or IMSAI) that was about the width and height of a notebook computer (thinner obviously). The only people who had such computers were die-hard geeks and hackers, generally with a hardware, rather than software bent: you built your own memory boards to save money, because pre-built boards where much more expensive than kits; and you scrounged HAM-fests for teletypes and built serial I/O and cassette interfaces (so you could save your programs). Altair Basic was a big deal: it only took 8 minutes to load from cassette. Dumb terminals could be had, but cost from one to three thousand dollars. The Apple ][ was one of the first compact, inexpensive computers: with a TV, disk drives, and DOS, a system could be put together for around $10,000.

Of course, 1981 brought the IBM PC (which initially supported a cassette port: disk drives were still a luxery for many). Ten megabyte hard disks became available by the mid 80s (full-height). I mention this because however crude you might think the PCs of the 80s were compared to today's PCs, they were light-years ahead of the mid to late 70s prehistoric versions, which really could not be called "personal".

By the mid-80s I had seen more technological innovation in 20 years, than my parents did since they were born: for them, the big things were affordable cars, planes, phones, TVs, and perhaps Cable TV. I suppose the really big thing for them was electricity.

Of course, 20 years later we have recordable CDs and DVDs, digital cameras, miniture cell phones, the Internet, on-line billing, ordering, blogs, cyber-porn (can you imagine the porn industry when the only distribution medium was 16 mm film for a projector: "dirty magazines" with still pictures was all there was for most male teens to leer at -- today if you want hard-core porn, you probably do "read Playboy just for the articles"), MP3 players, digital TVs, PDAs, combination MP3 players, phones, and PDAs, instant messaging, personal FAX machines, satellite TV, home theatres, multi-channel sound (though quadraphonic kinda sputtered and died in the 70s), and so on.

So, yeah, the last 20 years have been a whirlwind of technological progress. But the "slow, and dull" progress of the 60s and 70s, was, at the time, no less dizzying to those of us who lived through it (VCRs!: time shifting!! [evil teenage boy grin: live action pornography with sound!])