Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]

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For people who weren’t kids in the UK, Blue Peter is a very long running weekly BBC TV programme aimed at kids. Common tropes include the studio pet(s) and garden, charity events, and the Blue Peter badge that you got for sending in a letter with a tip or other challenges (and which qualified you for various discounts at venues around the UK).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peter

> very long running

Since 1958 and over 5,000 episodes!

(so much of classic UK TV is either "has been broadcasting since the dawn of television in a largely unchanged format" or the other extreme of "we only ever made six episodes back in the 1970s and they are etched across everyone's childhood")

> "we only ever made six episodes back in the 1970s and they are etched across everyone's childhood"

Or alternatively sometimes scarred for life :)

And if taking a trip back through 1970's UK TV is something anyone's interested in then this is a fun book:

https://www.lulu.com/shop/stephen-brotherstone-dave-lawrence...

It blew my mind when, as an adult, I learned that there were only 15 episodes of Mr Bean (with one of those being a "Best Bits of Mr Bean" episode!).

WAT

W and I cannot stress this enough AT?!!!!!!

We had multiple re-runs of it in the 90s in various post-Soviet countries.

To be honest I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. I like a lot of Rowan Atkinson's work but I absolutely hated Mr Bean. Something about watching someone be inept in every possible way causes me a huge amount of stress and isn't something I'm able to derive any sense of enjoyment or fun from. If there were more episodes it might have become more of a cultural meme (like, say, The Simpsons), which I'd find really hard to deal with.

(This doesn't always follow, of course. The UK version of The Office is only 12 regular episodes plus a couple of specials, yet it's impact is still very much felt - at least in the UK - so I don't necessarily see there being a simple correlation between quantity of material and cultural significance. As much as the US series is also excellent I don't think it carries quite the same iconic status or cultural weight here even though there are a lot more episodes - obviously it might do in the US.)

See also: there are only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers.

Yes! One of my prized possessions is that badge and letter from Biddy Baxter.

I’ve got my badge somewhere, but no idea what happened to the reply. Guess it would have been Yvette Fielding era? (I sent in a way to recycle used christmas cards into decorative balls for the next year’s celebrations, which in retrospect seems almost tailored for the acquisition of a badge.)

British people of a certain age can be defined by their Blue Peter credentials and activities, rather like a geek-code. Mine FWIW; Lesley Judd, Peter Purves, John Noakes, Shep the Dog, Collecting milk bottle tops to buy a donkey (for some reason).

A Brit who when demonstrating some sort of art or craft says "Here's one I prepared earlier" is often referencing the Blue Peter art segments where they would start to assemble (say) a model of Tracy Island from 'sticky back plastic' and toilet rolls and then cut to a superbly finished creation.

It's the artistic equivalent of Step 1: take these household materials, Step 2: ???, Step 3: Profit!

So you're saying the gnomes have already invaded Airstrip One?

I feel its spiritual meme-cousin is this one: https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl

Little period details:

- strobing CRT monitors that don't line up with the frequency of the TV camera

- PCs in the internet cafe, Macs in media, Acorn Archimedes (with ARM processor!) in schools

- first thing to do with the global communications network is send a dumb message to the US President

- indexed-color images; you can see in one case when she changes windows and the colours go wrong in the background as the palette is swapped.

- very early HTML without even a DOCTYPE

- "all secondary schools are to be linked to the internet by the end of the year" (I would put money on that not having happened for several more years)

strobing CRT monitors that don't line up with the frequency of the TV camera

I studied Broadcast Engineering for my degree back in 1997, and you could definitely shift the input signal to match the refresh rate of a CRT screen or a flourescent tube light on the Sony BetaCam TV studio cameras I worked with. I reckon the BBC would have been working with similar or better tech in 1995. I wonder if this might have been a directorial choice to show what viewers expect rather than any technical issue.

In most scenes, the refresh rate is matched (Slightly off from the presenters computer in the internet cafe with the computer all most all other computers in the cafe set to a different refresh rate).

While television refresh rates on both sides of the pond matched local grid frequency, did computer monitor refresh rates necessarily match? VGA for example supported 60 Hz but not 50 Hz according to Wikipedia [1]. So in the UK, I would think you could sync with fluorescent lights, or VGA monitors, but not both (unless you recorded at say 10 fps).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array#Technical...

It's more likely that either they were working to a budget, or just didn't have the time to sync. I doubt they intentionally wanted the flicker

> - first thing to do with the global communications network is send a dumb message to the US President

For me that also was about the first website I visited back around that time when I had friends over, who didn't know Internet to show how easy you can get there from Europe.

Second stop was the local city councils page, and checking why my physics teacher was supporting for proposals as counselor.

I wonder if the ‘linking schools to the internet’ was more about the rollout of the .sch.uk domain name than about actual physical internet connectivity. In 1995 ‘getting on the internet’ was still largely a case of dial up to an ISP, and while schools in general probably had a PBX system on an ISDN, turning those into ‘internet’ was not just a case of enabling a data plan.

And then on the school end, they might have had a lab of computers, but 1) probably Acorn Archimedes at best and 2) probably on an econet rather than Ethernet LAN if networked at all; so getting those computers ‘linked up’ to the internet was going to be tricky.

So your ‘linked to the internet’ school would more likely be one PC in an office on dialup to an ISP for email.

Or maybe a simple webpage hosted by a friendly local university?

This captures a very interesting time back when the internet was seen culturally in a positive light with much academic potential. Later documentaries about the internet became more pessimistic and focused on cyber stalking, privacy abuse, hackers/viruses, et al. It truly was simpler times.

This must be some kind of fake history, where are all the ads on the web sites? Where are the pages jumping around as the browser reflows the content? Why are there no auto playing videos? Next you will be telling me nobody used their real names on the Internet in those days. Definitely fake.

I know it’s sarcasm but the thought of a small 64x64 video auto-playing at 0.25fps is hilarious to me.

Animated GIFs! Usually for the "under construction" logo.

Oh, RealVideo had you covered.

You never played Porntris I see. Note, NSFW, https://www.retrogames.cz/play_445-DOS.php?language=EN

I know it's a joke, but you made me look up when the first banner ad was, and it appears to be 1994: https://digiday.com/media/history-of-the-banner-ad/

The BBC brand guidelines would never have allowed an ad to appear, though.

These absolutely existed. Image-heavy pages for which designers didn't specify the image size in HTML (i.e. many/most pages) jumped like crazy as the images slowly loaded over a modem. Maybe no auto-playing videos, but auto playing GIFs, MIDI files, and Java applets(!) were common, not to mention <marquee> and <blink> tags.

Heck, I was about to joke about cookie banners not being a thing -- but they sort of were, as they had just been invented (1994 [1]), and any site which relied on them inevitably had some prominent text exhorting you to use a browser which supported them (whether you already were or not). (Or frames -- the very first web page I visited -- nintendo.com -- I was greeted with Cranky Kong lecturing me about frame support.) This was of course right next to the ubiquitous "best viewed in Netscape Navigator / Internet Explorer" badge.

Oh and don't forget the toolbar plugins. Anyone from the cohort for whom the phrase "eternal September" was invented to describe had between 3-7 of these in their browser, each one taking up another half inch of real estate. So top to bottom you'd have:

* title bar

* menu bar

* (enormous) navigation bar

* bookmark toolbar

* AOL toolbar

* Yahoo! toolbar

* Ask Jeeves toolbar

* Bonzi Buddy toolbar or some other spyware

* anti-spyware toolbar

* web page

* horizontal scroll bar

* status bar

* Windows dock

And the web page itself was often divided up into multiple frames (for ads or navigation or just by accident), each with their own scroll bars because they'd be just a pixel too large to fit in their allotted space. Probably only a 1/4 of the full screen real estate would actually show content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#History

Did Blue Peter always have such cool backing music? That sounds like Massive Attack Unfinished Sympathy...

It is! I didn't realize the song was that old. 1991!

Massive Attack were approximately 40 years ahead of their time.

I miss the quaintness of being on the old Internet. Maybe it's just the Endless September of it all, but the content seemed more cared for when it wasn't trivial to put out. I do think it's great that barriers for publishing are lower than what they were, but sometimes I sure do wonder if they're too easy, of people are too connected. Maybe that's just what getting old feels like?

I miss the quaintness of being on the old Internet.

I think that back then, you'd often host your own site. Or at least, write most of it in HTML.

It was mostly your content, and maybe if on geocities or something, a few ads around the edges.

Now, it's 280 chars surrounded by a whole page of, what is realistically, ads or 'not you' content.

Content is broken up, piecemeal, not one.

While you can setup a singular resource, it's more rare for people to do.

Many old pages were just a text menu on the left "birds", "my dog", "the month I spent travelling", and then deep content.

Now you get mostly reactionary fluff "Can you believe the horrible thing I read!!!"

> Now you get mostly reactionary fluff "Can you believe the horrible thing I read!!!"

Could be worth checking the mirror there.

Reactionary fluff != citing reactionary fluff.

Describing the internet in reactionary fluff terms != citing reactionary fluff.

But that's what it is now.

Look at the news. The headlines. Entirely designed to create a reaction, to drive reaction, often entirely misrepresenting the contents of the article itself.

And news content has changed dramatically. It's all keyed to drive 'reactionary fluff' responses, so that it spreads. On Twitter. On Facebook. Via Google search.

And this is the biggest part of Twitter, Facebook. It drives clicks. It drives engagement. And by far?

If you look at sheer numbers, of what people do on the internet? It's engaging in this.

Even this site, is siloed into that model ... discussion most often about an external page. Now, this site attempts to reduce reactionary fluff, but it quite often leaks in, both through the story contents, and with people not even reading the article, just the headline.

If you take away porn, and all the SEO spam pages, and all the clone pages which use algos to clone content and just pimp ads, what does the average person use the internet for?

"Reactionary fluff" is apt.

The things that made me feel older than anything was: When they recorded the audio clip for their webpage, they used Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy" as the background audio. I still love that tune. Of course, they couldn't get away with using that now without proper licensing.

The BBC has a unique exception when it comes to music, I believe. That’s why you often hear The Beatles in the Eastenders cafe. ITV couldn’t do that.

Don't know if that is true.

https://www.bbc.com/academy-guides/music-copyright-in-tv-wha...

> ITV couldn’t do that.

Yes they can, all they need to do is stump up for the licenses the same as the BBC do via organisations such as the PRS:

https://www.prsformusic.com/

https://www.prsformusic.com/licences/broadcasting-music-on-t...

They have a blanket licence agreements with PRS and similar organisations. IIRC is only covers using some number of seconds of any given track, and to use an entire piece (or larger part there-of) separate permission must be requested (and perhaps paid for).

Yes, the BBC used to license tons of music (still does?), they had some really cool background music for all sorts of stuff by really good artists. Late shows on Radio one used to be legendary for the variety of alternative music they played

I was watching a video of the BBC show Micro Live explaining how email works...in 1986! And it was done live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL1NaenGPdw

Did you notice that at the start the acoustic coupler has the handset placed the wrong way round?

The browser in the video is a very early Netscape Navigator (v1.0N maybe..) written by Marc Andreessen and others, who founded Netscape and went on to found Andreessen Horowitz which has invested in lots of YC startups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

Project Code Rush

Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape's last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31 1998, and the impact on the engineers' lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.

Blue Peter bury time capsules and dig them up occasionally. I think I remember watching one getting buried. I just looked up one being dug up, it was much less interesting than I could've imagined.

Interesting to see broadcast video from 27 years ago preserved in such high quality. The BBC has spent a lot of money to preserve pretty much everything it has broadcast in the last 30 years.

it wasn't always part of the BBC's reflexes to keep all the content. They must have learned and adapted.

Blue Peter actually has a really good survival rate, most stuff from the mid-1960s onwards survives. Whilst this is perhaps partly forward thinking on the part of Editor[1] Biddy Baxter, AFAIK it was partly so older material could be reused in later editions to save money.

[1] The title of the "showrunner" of Blue Peter, so in the meaning of "editor of a newspaper", not "videotape editor".

You'd hope the original broadcaster would have broadcast quality archives. It's not like they'd keep them on LP VHS.

The BBC has had to do various work to keep the archives accessible, mid-90s stuff like this was probably recorded on D3 digital composite tape, but that's now long obsolete, so has to be transferred to modern formats (nowadays as files on LTO tape AFAIK). AFAIK stuff on 2" quad (the first practical video tape format, used from the 1950s to early 80s) has been transferred at least twice, from quad to D3 or DigiBeta, then to files.

"The information superhighway" - great callback. I love the scan lines running across the CRT as she's talking in the opening clip.

Those were magical times

As history would have it, blue peter would have loved the 2022 MAP friendly internet.

"MAP"?

"Minor Attracted Persons", I think OP is trolling.

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