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The 4-frame-per-second video recordings were made on 78-RPM lacquers by John Logie Baird in 1927 and 1928. Don McLean performed the restoration.

Actually, roger melle was nothing to do with clarkson...

It was a piss take of a look north presenter called Mike Neville who by all accounts was a beer swilling, chain smoking, lecherous old coot, not unlike roger melle!

http://www.transdiffusion.org/emc/geohistory/hijac k.php

Do that, and you're gold.

Re: IBM inventions and discoveries include ... magnetic storage (1955)

'Fraid not. "Valdemar Poulsen, today acknowledged as the father of magnetic recording, demonstrated his magnetic wire recorder in 1898" - a history of video. Has the poster considered a job at the patent office?

If it takes 21 years to go from 405 to 625/PAL which has a clearly explainable advantage to the average consumer, and where sets were unreliable, then it's going to take a lot longer to eliminate analog.

Also the reason for wanting to do it has gone - they can't make money selling spectrum any more.

The BBC has only been a pile of steaming horseshit because of the mess that the Tories made of broadcasting regulations, the resulting lack of standards on ITV and the consequential dive in quality at the BBC because of their perennial game of catch-up. The BBC is still a hell of a lot better than anyone else, BTW.

Want to discuss this further? Try this site.

Um, some goverments have already begun to abandom analogue TV. Berlin, for example. The deadlines have passed and the terrestrial analogue TV has been turned off, accordingly. Other regions in Germany will follow in 2004. The transisition should finish in 2010, like in several other countries (e.g. UK, Japan 2011)

An overview about the state on digital TV in the world.

The UK is a bit ahead of the US in broadcasting HDTV -- we have several digital-only channels -- but as reported in this BBC article takeup of HDTV (more generally known as just "digital TV" in the UK) has been slowed by the collapse of the first big digital TV company, ITV Digital. The collapse was more due to poor management than any real flaw in HDTV, but as another article states, the deadline (in the UK) of 2010 for the full switch to digital is probably unrealistic, given how long it took to switch the nation to colour television (didn't happen in any major way until 1969!).

There is a remarkable phenmenom with technical acronyms.

Thier meaning shifts over time. Mainly this is because the technology they describe becomes successful and the meaning of the orginal expansion is no longer valid. However the acronym is firmly rooted almost like a brand name, so usually the expansion is changed.

For instance VHS did originally expand to Vertical Helical Scan - which is a description of the way that the enigineering team solved how keep the tape speed over the head high without having to have the tape itself spooling at hig speed and therefor needing a huge amount of it.

Later as it became popular and mass market the expansion changed to Video Home System as this was more understandable for the consumer.

Video Home System (a less daunting rendering of the original acronym, which stood for Vertical Helical Scan)
Reference : Baird to MPEG A History Of Video

Look at the GSM mobile phone standard. Orignially this stood for Group Spécial Mobile - a special interest of the CEPT set up to develop one digital standard, based on the existing ISDN standard,for mobile phones in Europe to replace the mess of competing analogue ones.

Nowadays, given the massive success of the standard the expansion is Global System for Mobile communications .

DECT originally stood for Digital European Cordless Terminal . For the non Europeans its a standard for short range digital handset to base station communication for cordless phones. Being a standard you can now buy extra handsets from whoever you want, and things like wireless modems. As its success took off and it began to be used outside of Europe then the expansion changed to Digital Enhanced Cordless Terminal

As mentioned elsewher in this thread DVD originally stood for Digital Video Disc but as it became apparent that a high capacity replacement for CD could have many uses it was renamed to Digital Versatile Disc with the convention that the specific use is tagged afterwards, hence DVD-Video, DVD-RAM, DVD-ROM, DVD-Audio The moral of the story is be careful what you state an acronym stands for - a whole load of them in daily use have stood for a number of things in thier history!!

Oh, and yes I do currently work in the telecoms side of it, how did you guess??