On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 12:08 +0000, Graham Seaman wrote: > > It depends what you mean by hacking television. 25 years ago > > I was involved with the British Amateur Television Club, a > > group of people with home office licences to transmit > > television pictures to each other. > > This wasn't about broadcasting and content, just having fun > > with the technology. Most people were doing 405 (or 625) line > > PAL, but there were a few people dedicated to 25-line > > mechanical TV gear - think of it as akin to ascii-vision ;-) > > > > > I don't know if it was the same group, but there also the people doing > slow-scan stuff - sending TV using ham frequencies.
Yes, you had to have a Home Office amateur radio licence to do this. > People doing stuff > like sending the equivalent of home videos to family in Australia, etc. Well, I suppose some people were interested in content, it stands to reason, but most of us were just technology nerds who liked soldering things together :-/ In the pre-Internet days amateur radio was the best place [1] for tech experiments - we pioneered a lot of the practical microwave technologies, and sent signals long-distance with our own satellites, and by bouncing them off the moon :-) > There's no technology that doesn't get played with unless the law blocks > it ;-) The earlier car-hacking example leads onto modifications well outside the law of course, but I note your emoticon ;) The point, of course, is that a healthy portion of the population will always wish to have control over technological purchases solely in order to modify them, whether for a particular end, or ``just for fun''. (Wow, I got back on-topic ;) - Richard [1] There was hi-fi as well, but the exciting tech like building your own electrostatic loudspeakers, never had that big a following among the homebrew crowd. Nevertheless there are thousands of people each year building new hi-fi valve amplifiers, and many more modifying turntables and CD players, or hacking their loudspeakers. -- Richard Smedley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sustainable IT Consultant http://m6-it.org/ ``Software Freedom for the Voluntary Sector'' _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
