Fifty Years Ago .... from the pages of Computer Weekly
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15th May 1975 computing, compiled by TNMOC volunteer archivist, Brian Aldous.
A selection of stories from Computer Weekly from 15th May 1975. The full archive of Computer Weekly can be seen at TNMOC, where there are special rolling displays of front pages from 25 and 40 years ago.
TV decoder from Texas: A decoder for building into television sets to enable them to receive Teletext transmissions has been announced by Texas Instruments. Experimental Teletex transmissions are currently being made by the BBC under the name Ceefax, and the IBA starts its experimental Oracle service next month. Texas Instruments sees its Tifax decoder adding about £100 to the cost of a television receiver at the start, possibly falling to £20 by 1978. Teletext uses blanking lines in the television signal to carry digitally encoded text which can be displayed on the screen instead of the television picture. The current experimental service consists of brief news items, weather, financial news and travel information. (CW 445 15/5/1975 p1)
Printing firm gets OCR reader: A significant breakthrough in the doggedly traditional UK printing industry has been made with the first sale to a UK printer of the Compuscan 180 OCR reader, a machine designed especially to read pages of editorial copy for computer typesetting. The customer is Unwin Brothers of Woking, Surrey, a firm which already makes extensive use of computer typesetting and photo-composition. The Compuscan 170 was sold to Unwins by Crosfield Electronics Ltd of Holloway, London, the UK distributor for its manufacturer, the Compuscan Corp of New Jersey. Unwin Brothers prints books and periodicals, and types pages of copy in Olivetti Perry fount for reading by the Compuscan 170 after they have been proof read. Unwins estimates that the Compuscan 170 mis-reads no more than one in 70,000 characters. (CW 445 15/5/1975 p3)
