Date   : Fri, 05 Jan 2007 21:26:41 -0000
From   : BBCMailingList@... (Ian Wolstenholme)
Subject: Acorn Interactive Video system

This is very interesting, I wasn't aware of an Interactive Video
system before the Domesday System.

The Domesday Machine uses the "Master Advanced Interactive
Video" computer, I always wondered how the word "Advanced"
got in there, maybe it was to distinguish it as the Mk II version
of this earlier BBC B "Interactive Video", just like ANFS followed
NFS and ADFS followed DFS!

I'm not sure about all this though, I wonder are we talking
about an actual interactive video system based on the BBC B
which was released and available to buy long before Domesday
came out, or a development system for the Domesday Project
using the BBC B since the Master hadn't been launched at the time?

There is an article from A&B Computing in July 1985, showing the
"Domesday System" but the photograph is of a BBC B with 6502 
cheese wedge and a top-loading laser disc player.

The article mentions that the BBC and Philips are developing
a laserdisc player to run the system.  I think as a result of that,
the genlock was moved from the BBC to the LV player (although
I may be wrong about that).  Clearly by the time the
project was ready to be launched, the Master 128 had come
out so Acorn could hardly have brought out a new system
based around the BBC B which was no longer in production.

Best wishes,



Ian



----- Original Message -----
From: Jules Richardson [mailto:julesrichardsonuk@...]
To: bbc-micro@...
Sent: Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:33:28 -0600
Subject: [BBC-Micro] Acorn Interactive Video system


Does anyone here have one of these? Note that this *isn't* the Domesday 
system; it was earlier and initially used a BBC B for the computer (although I 
gather later on a Master was used instead). The Laserdisc player wasn't the 
venerable VP415 either, but it seems like user had a choice of a different 
Philips unit (possibly an 830 series) or some unknown Pioneer player.

There were no LVROM facilities; control software was loaded from floppy (or 
local ROM storage, presumably) rather than coming from the LV disc itself.

It sounds like Microtext Plus (NPL) was the favoured 'control' language, 
although it's not clear if that was purely for interactive apps created by end 
users, or commercial ones too.

No idea if the system contained a genlock or not, although I'm suspecting not. 
Launch date was October 1984, price circa ?3000.

(All of this gleaned from an unearthed A+B Computing article [1] about the 
Domesday system; I've got a flyer somewhere on the earlier IV system, but it's 
even lighter on details than the magazine article)

[1] Atop the scan pile right now as the mag's on loan - unless someone else 
has already done work on A+B magazine scans. There's a nice review in there on 
the Cumana 68008 copro which is the reason someone set it aside for me :-)

cheers

Jules


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