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markhb writes "40 years ago today, the first trans-Atlantic TV transmission made it out of the Maine woods and into history, via the original Telstar. The IEEE and Lucent plan to commemorate the event at three events today in Pleumeur-Bodou, France, Goonhilly Downs, England, and Andover, Maine."
Was it an ad for TVs?
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Oh, wait...
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
All well and nice to commemorate this first signal and all....
But didn't the Blair Witch Project come outta those woods too? They must be cursed, cause the utter shite that movies was still gives me nightmares.
I won't ever go back in the woods again.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Andover? I thought Andover went under?
The newer ones are smaller, and often fixed, pointing to satellites in geo-stationary orbit.
There there are a pair of microwave dishes (in and out?) that look small, but carry all the terrestrial traffic to/from Goonhilly.
At the time (12 years ago ?) Goonhilly carried almost all Europes transatlantic traffic.
Cheers, Andy!
Andy Rabagliati
Quoth the NASA site, "Frequencies used were 6,390 MHz uplink and 4,170 MHz downlink".
Is this a typo? How were such frequencies possible in the early 1960s? And using less than 15 watts to boot!?
http://www.lucent.com/minds/telstar/telstarsat.jpg
It sickens me that this is hosted by Lucent, but it does the job. Too bad more neat "online" photos wern't at this resolution...
"The IEEE and Lucent plan to commemorate the event at three events today in Pleumeur-Bodou, France, Goonhilly Downs, England, and Andover, Maine "
That's great news! Goonhilly Downs needed a second big event to add to their annual "Laughing At Our Town's Name Festival".
------
Today's Top Deals
It looks like ATT in the early 60's pretty much invented our whole world. And now, it's pretty much just 5000 minute calling plans and crappy stock performance.
If you ever make it to northwestern france, be *sure* to check out the communication site at Plemeur-Boudou! It's very cool, you drive through a forest in a hilly landscape, and all of a sudden huge satellite dishes pop out like mushrooms ... and you can still visit this very first satellite. all in all, very impressive.
What would happen if a massive solar flare or some such space phenomena took out all of the satellites? Would earth communications still function?
Well, landlines would... Anyone navigating by GPS would be in trouble though!
"Information wants to be paid"
It's interesting to note that domestic television satellites didn't reach North America until 1972, 10 years after Telstar. Here's a link to a Communications Satellites Short History. From that page:
In 1965, ABC proposed a domestic satellite system to distribute television signals. The proposal sank into temporary oblivion, but in 1972 TELESAT CANADA launched the first domestic communications satellite, ANIK, to serve the vast Canadian continental area. RCA promptly leased circuits on the Canadian satellite until they could launch their own satellite. The first U.S. domestic communications satellite was Western Union's WESTAR I, launched on April 13, 1974.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
When I was but a lad, we used to vacation in Rangeley Lakes, ME. My father (who worked for AT&T at the time) took the family over to Andover to see the ground station. I remember it as being this fantastically huge globe with a microwave transmitter inside it.
Also, I remember my father taking us outside of our home on Long Island to see Telstar going overhead. Nowadays, you can see satellites just by looking up and waiting ten or fifteen minutes.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I was attending summer school at the time. In 1962, like most college students, I did not have television sets in my dorm room; television sets were still fairly big, fairly heavy, and fairly expensive--and there were certainly no cable jacks in dorm rooms. It took a little searching to find a lounge somewhere in the university that had a TV set. And then I had to convince the people in the lounge to let me tune to the channel that was carrying it.
I felt at the time that this was a turning point in history--like the first transatlantic broadcast over that technological wonder, the "coaxial cable," which I had seen as a kid. _I_ was fairly excited by it. But the general lay population hardly knew or cared about it. Some years before, when my family and I went into the schoolyard on a summer evening to view the Echo satellite, we had plenty of company. In contrast, the Telstar broadcast went virtually unnoticed.
Well, of course, it WAS utterly boring. Speeches by dignitaries and some miserable scraps of French Ed-Sullivan-show-type entertainment--I think I remember some singers and some dancers.
Yes, it WAS an historic moment--yet utterly forgettable.
Later that year, an instrumental number named "Telstar" (for no apparent reason) made the top forty. Lots of people knew that tune. I'm not sure what percentage of them knew that "Telstar" was the name of a communications satellite.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The first worldwide TV program was 5 years later (June 25, 1967) - the Beatles in their Magical Mystery Tour mode doing "All You Need is Love." Covered 24 countries, 5 continents via Echo II (?) a satellite which had no transmitter, just a reflector.
:( )
I'm sure some worthy celebs would like to commemorate this event - how about it Sir Paul/Mick?
(Unfortunately, though alive I think I was probably tuned to Listen with Mother instead
0. ATMs and "multi-branch banking": no longer did you have to go to your branch to make deposits and withdrawls, nor did you have to deal with a human teller.
1. VCRs: they didn't start getting popular until about 1979-1981, and cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars. Do you remember the VHS vs. Beta format wars?
2. Compact Disks: radio stations started using them instead of records, calling them "laser disks" (not to be confused with video laser disks), and making a big deal of the quality (over well-worn vinyl). The first ones were around $3000. By 1986, you could get a portable for around $200.
3. Cellular phones: about the size of a brick, access was available in few metropolitan areas. They first started to be used in cars, because of their bulk, replacing older-style "mobile phones", that were essentially radios.
4. Pocket calculators. We got to use slide-rules in science class: pocket calculators were considered an unfair advantage for those students who could afford $150 for four functions and square root.
5. Computers: the hobbyist Altair became available, with an 8080 CPU, and was featured in a January 1975 Popular Electronics article. The Apple ][, and a host of CP/M-based machines followed. As this is a geek forum, I'll dwell a bit on the pre-history of 1975-1981. The Altairs (and IMSAIs) were big, boxy, noisy, and expensive: I remember 256 bytes of memory costing $119. The 2102 1kbit static ram was a breakthrough: 8 kilobytes could fit on an S100 card (for the Altair or IMSAI) that was about the width and height of a notebook computer (thinner obviously). The only people who had such computers were die-hard geeks and hackers, generally with a hardware, rather than software bent: you built your own memory boards to save money, because pre-built boards where much more expensive than kits; and you scrounged HAM-fests for teletypes and built serial I/O and cassette interfaces (so you could save your programs). Altair Basic was a big deal: it only took 8 minutes to load from cassette. Dumb terminals could be had, but cost from one to three thousand dollars. The Apple ][ was one of the first compact, inexpensive computers: with a TV, disk drives, and DOS, a system could be put together for around $10,000.
Of course, 1981 brought the IBM PC (which initially supported a cassette port: disk drives were still a luxery for many). Ten megabyte hard disks became available by the mid 80s (full-height). I mention this because however crude you might think the PCs of the 80s were compared to today's PCs, they were light-years ahead of the mid to late 70s prehistoric versions, which really could not be called "personal".
By the mid-80s I had seen more technological innovation in 20 years, than my parents did since they were born: for them, the big things were affordable cars, planes, phones, TVs, and perhaps Cable TV. I suppose the really big thing for them was electricity.
Of course, 20 years later we have recordable CDs and DVDs, digital cameras, miniture cell phones, the Internet, on-line billing, ordering, blogs, cyber-porn (can you imagine the porn industry when the only distribution medium was 16 mm film for a projector: "dirty magazines" with still pictures was all there was for most male teens to leer at -- today if you want hard-core porn, you probably do "read Playboy just for the articles"), MP3 players, digital TVs, PDAs, combination MP3 players, phones, and PDAs, instant messaging, personal FAX machines, satellite TV, home theatres, multi-channel sound (though quadraphonic kinda sputtered and died in the 70s), and so on.
So, yeah, the last 20 years have been a whirlwind of technological progress. But the "slow, and dull" progress of the 60s and 70s, was, at the time, no less dizzying to those of us who lived through it (VCRs!: time shifting!! [evil teenage boy grin: live action pornography with sound!])
You could've hired me.
Many syndicated radio shows used to be distributed on LPs, you know, the big round black vinyl things.
In 1978, PBS became the first North American broadcaster to use satellite transmission for the primary distribution of its programming.
Before then, most broadcast networks used point-to-point connections such as AT&T's terrestrial microwave system to deliver content to sattions. Satellite was only used to acquire content for networks, not to distribute it to stations.
What I find interesting is that the development of long-distance fiber optics could make a large fraction of satellite use obselete. Already, the majority of international telephone and increasingly television signals are transmitted through fiber optic lines on long distance and undersea cables.
Given fiber optics' HUGE data capacity, the day that fiber optics achieves the last mile data connection into the home residence cheaply is the day small satellite dishes become obselete.
Essentially, satellites in the future will primarily used for communications beyond the reach of fiber optic lines, primarily in remote regions.
And for those of you interseted in the local pseudo-news coverage, the Lewiston Sun-Journal has it here.