My jaw hit the floor..

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My jaw hit the floor..

Postby gary » Wed Oct 21, 2015 8:19 pm

Most of us would know that Britain has a connection with the Apple series of "i" products iMac, iPod, iPad, iPhone, iDunnowotsnxt, etc via their designer Sir Jony Ive.

I have had a professional involvement with digital audio techniques beginning circa 1985 (with involvement with an eprom based radio promo system) and lasting until my retirement in 2007 and I thought I was pretty well up on it's history.

So to say this came as a bit of a shock to me is an understatement:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... money.html

Yes, the technology of the day meant that the device had a considerable amount of development ahead of it before it was a practical product *but* the fact that someone had actually conceived of the concept in 1979 is, to me, astounding.

Note: There is a contemporaneous paper describing the system as a whole (in the same manner as iPod+iTunes is a system), including DRM considerations, that is eerily prescient of the Apple product.

Getting innovative technology out of "proof of concept" phase and into production seems to have been a recurring problem for the UK in the 20th Century with one notable example circa 1926 ;-).

Note: This post is made in response to Steve's worry that posts aren't getting though, and a test thereof, since the last purge of spammers - none-the-less I deem it to be of at least some passing interest.
gary
 

Re: My jaw hit the floor..

Postby Steve Anderson » Thu Oct 22, 2015 12:02 pm

Gary, thanks for the posting on two counts, first is that all is well with the board system, second, it is of interest, particularly to myself. However the UK Daily Mail website is blocked here.

As someone who still works in the broadcasting industry and cut his teeth in radio I would be interested in this. In the early 80s all short-form material, commercials, jingles and the like were on those horrid NAB cartridges.

A decade on Sonilex UK developed a replacement system based on 2.88MB floppy discs, which was better than the other is a moot point. All I recall is the floppies continually getting 'lost' for the staff's personal use. Later, longer segments moved onto Mini-Disks - broadcast quality?

Now it's all server-based as is virtually all TV material.

I do have some affection for those NAB cart machines, at least they had visible moving parts. Here's a link that outlines their operation...

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

gary wrote:...*but* the fact that someone had actually conceived of the concept in 1979 is, to me, astounding.


I had a discussion with my father who was then working in the magnetic tape industry sometime around 1975-1976 and I predicted that in the future tape would be replaced by chips, which to a large part is true - flash drives and the like, even SSDs are rapidly coming down in price. Wisely I didn't put a timescale on it!

Steve A.
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Steve Anderson
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