Date   : Mon, 13 Sep 2004 01:32:52 +0100
From   : "Peter Edwards" <samwise@...>
Subject: OT? BBC B communications through time

Hi, all.

Apologies if this is considered off-topic or too fortean (if it is, ignore
me and I'll go back to lurking) but I just wondered if anyone here had heard
about the curious case in 1984-87 where a guy in Dodleston believed himself
to be in contact with someone called Tomas Harden from the 16th-century
along with other characters including some claiming to be from the future,
one of them being known as 2109 (or 2105).

The events described have been the subject of a BBC documentary, under the
title Out of This World if I remember correctly, and have also previously
featured in an issue of Fortean Times:

The Vertical Plane - FT108
http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/108_para.shtml

What intrigued me when I first heard the description, though, was that at
the centre of much of the apparent correspondence was a humble BBC Model B
fitted with an Acorn DFS upgrade!  See pic on page linked above.  The
messages are purported to have been left - somehow through the space-time
continuum, we're led to believe - on the editing screen of the ROM-based
word processor EDWORD
[http://bbc.nvg.org/rom/Various/util/Edword-v2.02c.rom] or within EDWORD
files created on disk (or appended to them).

Most of the available information was published in a book, The Vertical
Plane, written by the person at the centre of the episode, Ken Webster but
it's pretty hard to track down these days [1989 Grafton Books, ISBN:
0-586-20476-8].

This area isn't really much of a hobby of mine - I'm hardly what you'd term
a believer - but I just found the detail of this one does make for quite an
interesting bedtime read.  It also serves quite handy, when pub chatter
turns to the 8-bit holy wars, to be able to point out that the Beeb was
capable of inter-dimensional communications, even if that angle wasn't
pushed by Acorn's marketers.  That usually stops the sinclair zealots - for
a short time, anyway.

Yeah, so ... just wondered if anyone else had heard of it, really, or had
any beeb-related thoughts on the subject to discuss - perhaps, even, news of
any more recent developments in the case since the FT article was published
in '98?

I checked the popular beeb sites (8bs, bbc.nvg.org, stairwaytohell etc.) and
google but there doesn't seem to be much out there which is a shame as I
reckon it probably stands our uniquely in the history of our fave beige box
...

Cheers,

Peter.