The first generation of real-time train information screens for British railways came in the form of suspended color CRTs in familiar rounded fiberglass housings. They were a ubiquitous sight across the network for years, until of course suddenly, they weren’t. Can they be brought back? [Heliomass] has come about as close as it’s possible to be, with a modern emulation that runs from live data feeds.
The screens were recognizably using the same graphics standards as Teletext, and thus it was no surprise back in the day to see from time to time an Acorn boot screen in a railway station.
We remember some debate at the time as to whether they were running Archimedes of BBC Micro hardware behind the scenes, though it seems likely it might have been the industrial BBC Micro derivative.
The modern recreation uses an emulated BBC Micro for the signage, with a serial connection to a server component running in Python on more modern hardware. This handles grabbing the data and sending it to the Beeb for display. The result is an unexpected bit of nostalgia for anyone who spent the 1980s or ’90s in south east England.
Nice! I grew up in Essex and travelled a lot on trains in the ’70s through to mid-’90s.
Now we just need a random “explaination for delays” for that real nostalgic feel 😁
Let me start:
Train operator suffering from pinworms.
“As They Should Be” – Oh come on HAD – way to run a tech blog while insisting we should go back in time and unravel all of the pain-staking changes made for great reasons (even if they’re just stepping stones).
In my opinion – the way it should be starts and ends at the smartphone/smartwatch/earbud – there’s no need to scatter expensive, energy wasting, hard to read/hear, light and sound polluting systems all around the station.
When everybody has smartphone (or equivalent in this regard) technology that can communicate with them any way that they prefer – in their language, audio/visual, vibration, timing etc.
Then we can and should strip all of this equipment and either recycle it (carefully because of harmful components) or put it in a museum.
pains-taking (taking pains : expending, showing, or involving diligent care and effort)
vs. pain-staking (impalement intended to maximize suffering?)
My bad – I should hope most can still understand given the context. I’ve found that my spell checker is somewhat cursed and I’m no better when I’m in the mood to comment. Plz forgive me :)
>pains-taking
wolololo I thoght you said “penis-talking” XDDDDD
I truly wish we lived in a world where your comment won’t be deleted because it “offends” people – because you’re not at all wrong to state such a thing :D
I do find that HAD in general seems to uncomfortably (for me) lean towards nostalgia and the history of tech rather than educating people about the very serious and well intentioned reasons for the evolution of technology. There’s mountains of very interesting (to those who care) things to learn but no author seems to be able to capture it properly – instead we just get a mass attractive spin on one aspect of something already going viral elsewhere. (Sorry I’m drunk again)