Wow! have the character generators come a long ways!! ! The text is so blocky, and there's no fancy background pictures like today. I remember when the Amigas came out when I was a teenager. They became really popular for those cable bulletin board channels because you could post real pictures on them, and they had all sorts of fonts. Everyone in the TV industry was raving over what you could do with them, but today, even they seem to be rather mundane.
Just recently, I just installed a really cool character generator box called a "magic box" that is basically an entire TV station in a 2 rack-unit box. It runs BeOS You can put still slides up like a PowerPoint, and even schedule programs. You can record video programs right to the unit like a TiVo and have them scheduled to automatically play. To operate the unit, you just type it's IP address into an internet browser. A cool function I installed was to have a traffic cam come up in one of the slides do people could see what the highway looked like before the left for work.
I bet the cable company back then had racks and racks of 3/4 inch VCR's and they had to have someone on staff to cue those things up and feed them tapes 24/7 back then!
10 Apr 2008, 5:39 pm
