Antiope was the alternative French system, though the French gave up and switched to 'World System Teletext' i.e. 'our' system quite early in the game, before there were many decoders deployed. Antiope was actually somewhat more flexible in terms of what it could display - the British system was deliberately designed so that each line was transmitted with exactly the same number of characters, so that there was no need to decode the text into separate memory - the way it worked was that there were non-printing characters which changed the attributes of subsequent characters without displaying anything for that character itself. This sort of thing mattered many iterations of Moore's Law ago, and is a fine example of the finely honed British ability to do things on the cheap which has been developed over generations of the technical class being told they have to do things cheaply. Quite often this leads to something that does 85% of the job being done for 25% of the cost, in such a way that there is no way of enhancing it to do 100% of the job if and when more money / more resources / cheaper tech becomes available. In this case, however, it seems to have worked.
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- Celestial Weasel (
celestialweasel) wrote,
Celestial Weasel
celestialweasel
The dear and the Antiope
Antiope was the alternative French system, though the French gave up and switched to 'World System Teletext' i.e. 'our' system quite early in the game, before there were many decoders deployed. Antiope was actually somewhat more flexible in terms of what it could display - the British system was deliberately designed so that each line was transmitted with exactly the same number of characters, so that there was no need to decode the text into separate memory - the way it worked was that there were non-printing characters which changed the attributes of subsequent characters without displaying anything for that character itself. This sort of thing mattered many iterations of Moore's Law ago, and is a fine example of the finely honed British ability to do things on the cheap which has been developed over generations of the technical class being told they have to do things cheaply. Quite often this leads to something that does 85% of the job being done for 25% of the cost, in such a way that there is no way of enhancing it to do 100% of the job if and when more money / more resources / cheaper tech becomes available. In this case, however, it seems to have worked.
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