Category: Milestones to the Connected Lifestyle

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Nobel honours ‘masters of light’

Fibre optic pioneers to share Nobel physics prize – The Local (Sweden)

My comments on these Nobel Prizes

These Nobel Prize awards have become a celebration of two major technologies that are part of our everyday IT and lives

Charge-Coupled Device image sensor

One award went to Willard Boyle and George Smith who had developed the charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor which has become a watershed technology for image and movie capture to electronic media. Previously, video cameras were tube-based, which made them heavy, power-efficient beasts which were out of the financial reach of most of us and were more fragile. The chip-based solid-state image sensor had led initially to lightweight video cameras and camcorders that most of us could afford. This image sensor has also led to a cost-effective version based on a CMOS design allowing for cheaper digital and video cameras. It also led to the digital-camera revolution which allowed us to grab images on a reusable electronic media rather than film and also ushered in the webcam.

Now every video or digital camera that you encounter in your lives is based on that technology, whether it be the digital camera that you can take many snaps with, the closed-circuit camera in the shopping centre or freeway, or the TV cameras that bring us the vision that appear on the TV screens each day and night. This technology has assisted with astronomy in the form of the Hubble Space Telescope yielding the highly-detailed images of space and cameras sent out as part of the space missions to Mars.

Fibre Optics

The other award went to Charles Kao who had developed the concept of fibre optics, which is the transmission of light over a glass fibre. This technology initially was about decorative lighting but had yielded great advances in telecommunications and medicine.

In the medical field, this technology allowed for endoscopy which permitted improved diagnosis, especially of the digestive tract. It also allowed for “keyhole surgery” which allowed operations to be performed without the need to cut large incisions in the patient.

The telecommunications and IT sector benefited from the concept of using these fibres to transmit large data over long distances. This technology even is the backbone of the Internet and is becoming a solution for moving large amounts of data to the end-user’s home or business premises in the form of optical-fibre broadband services.

The technology is also being used in the AV sector to transmit digital audio between devices like DVD players and home-theatre receivers. It is because of the ability to avoid ground loops and other interference traps between the components.

Conclusion

At least the Nobel Prize is being used as a tool for recognizing these technologies that are part of the connected lifestyle.

 BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | 10 things you didn’t know about Ceefax

My comments on Ceefax, Austext (and teletext services) in relationship to the connected home

People, like myself, who watched what was happening with consumer technology through the 1970s and 1980s may have heard of “teletext”. This technology, which was launched by the BBC in 1974 and Channel 7 Australia in 1980, was a text-based information service that was delivered alongside the television picture in the vertical blanking part of the picture.

Typically, it required a suitably-equipped television set or regular television set used alongside a tuner-decoder box and users were able to bring up pages of information through the device’s remote control which had a numeric keypad. Infact, there have been some devices that connected to or were integrated in a computer that allowed the computer to pull off the information from a teletext service.

The common operating practice was, when you pressed the “Text” button, you saw a menu with a list of pages to go to. These typically had a number after them which you keyed in to the remote control when you want to view them. There was also an “up-down” button so you can “flip” through the pages. In a typical setup, you had a page like 101 or 120 as a “news index” with the stories listed like in the Web or on an RSS feed. Then you could key in the page number to view that story.

The system was primarily intended as a tool for providing user-optional text subtitles for hearing-impaired viewers (and people watching TV in noisy environments). But it has become a “preproduction”  showcase of what the Web concept was about. Most often, sports fanatics, especially horse-racing fanatics, used these services to find out what was happening with the sporting fixtures (and which runners to place bets on). In Australia, the Austext service was on televisions installed in TAB betting shops and sports bars. As well, a concept “connected home” in the early 1980s such as one that was established in Milton Keynes had to have a teletext-equipped TV set as part of the equipment that was provided.

One time, I had worked with some friends in helping them follow the New South Wales state election the Austext way. This was through me noting down page numbers for aggregate data and “desired electorates” where their relatives lived. When the TV showed up the pages, it had the latest counts up on the screen for the parties concerned. This was certainly a taste of things to come with following elections on the Web, where you could gain the latest results on Web pages established by media outlets or the state’s electoral offices, sometimes with graphs or coloured maps that reflect these results.

There had been improvements, mainly in the form of “fastext” where you navigate pages using the coloured buttons on the remote control or “TOPtext” where you navigate pages with a DVD menu page experience. But these worked if the TV set was tied in properly with the method of operation.

Some parts of the Web, like the use of RSS feeds and indexes, mimics the classic index pages; and even the news pages and the blogosphere provide the same kind of “fresh updates” that teletext had offered.

This certainly shows that some of the older technologies have laid the foundation for the connected lifestyle.

Links

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3548287/Long-distance-telephone-call-without-the-help-of-an-operator-is-50-years-old-today.html – The Telegraph

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7766147.stm – BBC

My Comments

Today has been the 50th anniversary of the self-dial long-distance telephone service in the UK, where telephone subscribers culd call across the country without needing the help of an operator. The demonstration call that was made on this day in 1958 was made by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II who was located at Bristol to the Lord Provost who was located in Edinburgh. A re-enactment of this call will take place between the same people at the same locations but using video-conferencing technology, not just as a celebration of accessible cost-effective long-distance telephony for all but as a proof of concept that this can be done with today’s video-conferencing methods.

The reason that this event is being celebrated is because it is one of the major milestones in telecommunications, where these calls had transcended many barriers. It was about bringing the business centres of a country together and simply bringing country areas to the city, just by lifting that telephone handset and dialing the correspondent’s number. It has then paved the way for such technologies as computers, the Internet and home networks.

I had talked about in a previou article on how to go about setting up your computer and your home network for video-conferencing with distant relatives using Skype or Windows Live Messenger. This, like VOIP (Voice Over IP) is now making long-distance telephony so much more affordable for most that we can even take this kind of service for granted.

Happy 50th Anniversary for the Self-Dial Long-Distance Telephone Call!