Digital Connections

Brilliance from Des Lynam and the BBC at the 1982 Commonwealth Games

As our heads turn towards the 2010 Commonweath Games in Dehli, we shouldn't forget the golden years of sport. The days before Sky Sports, when the BBC and Des Lynam reigned supreme.

Here's the introduction to BBC's Breakfast with Brisbane, way back in 1982.

We may laugh at the production quality, but an opening and classic one liner from Des remains timeless ....

Happy Birthday Ceefax

35 years ago, on the 23th September 1974 - Ceefax was launched on BBC.

Both my parents worked at BBC Newcastle, so I have a certain soft spot for BBC related stuff.

My childhood obsession for football results and league tables could only be served by hours of gazing at Ceefax. There's the old joke that, "This game would be more exciting on Ceefax", and as a Newcastle fan in the late seventies early eighties this is a pretty accurate representation on the state of affairs at St James'.

However I wasn't alone, up and down the country armchair fans would sit down on a Saturday afternoon, punch in "316" for live scores and just watch the numbers increase as the goals went in. Convergence was alive and well, by using the "mix" button a viewer could watch Grandstand at the same time.

Of course Ceefax was the start of Britain’s journey into Interactive Television, and in many ways the most successful, with 22m browsing 600 pages at one point. Wow that’s an advertisers dream!

Ceefax truly came into its own when breaking news. Live TV was somewhat of a novelty back in the 70's and Ceefax was a bridge between the event taking place and actually being reported on TV and radio news. Plus Ceefax would only report pure hard cold "brute facts".

Skysports News recently dragged on Richard Dunne's transfer from Manchester City to Aston Villa for close to 48 hours, with plenty of footage of footballers and agents driving cars in and out of leisure centres. Ceefax would have reported the Dunne transfer beautifully in 20 Characters

"R Dunne ManC - Villa"        

Brilliant job done, that even puts Twitter's 140 characters to shame.

Rather sadly we'll soon be deprived of Ceefax and its simplistic brilliance, as part of the analogue television signal, CEEFAX will finish with the "Digital Switchover in 2012.

In the meantime, Happy Birthday Ceefax!

When Did My World Go Digital?

It's difficult to put an exact date on it.

Apart from mucking around on an old Atari 2600 in 1980 with my mates (surely playing Pong doesn’t count as “digital”?), my first digital encounter was as an 8 year old at the BBC in 1981.

My mother and stepfather both worked at the BBC in Newcastle, so after school I often went to the BBC after school and sat in the “control room”, or in the studio watching Look North go out live. However, it was in the control room where I used to “play” on the BBC Micro, and it was here that I discovered that my grasp of Breakout was far better than my grasp of programming in BASIC. 

1981 was somewhat of a landmark year, for Christmas I was given the mighty ZX81 (in kit form) with pressure sensitive keyboard. 9 year olds today would laugh at it, but at the time it was groundbreaking. The ZX81 brought computing into the home and surely must take a lot of the credit for where we are today. Once again my patience with BASIC was tested to the limit, instead I chose to upload Kevin Toms Football Manager via a cassette tape player, - and in hindsight it’s laughable. If I was ever to become a world class programmer then this was undoubtedly my opportunity to grab the first of my 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell - Outliers). 

My parents also realised that I was never going to become a computer programmer or indeed a football manager. Despite asking Father Christmas very nicely, a ZX Spectrum never materialised – shame.

Safe to say that computers and pretty much anything digital took a back burner until University, even then in ’94 we were permitted to submit “handwritten essays”…. absolutely unbelievable.

My first job was at a marketing agency called International Marketing and Promotions (now Arc & part of Publicis) and we were lucky enough to have one computer between four – I cant remember whether it had t’internet or not, but I do remember faxing creative through creative campaigns to my client!

1997 … next job, ZGC, and one modem for an office of 30. We had to literally queue for the internet and I used to stay late to log onto nufc.com, although to be fair everybody had a shite Apple Macintosh of their very own. Luckily change came in ’98 and ZGC hit the big time, new offices and sparkly PC for all suits – for me the digital revolution had started.

Furiously fast forward 10 years (and a few jobs) and we're certainly past the point of no return, the world has without doubt gone digital. Digital is here and impacting our lives more than we could have ever dreamed.