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The Max Headroom Incident

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Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#31

Post by h2odragon »

leephillips wrote: post #25
h2odragon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TV stations used a big transmitter up on the Sears tower for their real signal. That got fed by a little microwave dish antenna pointed out to a relay "in the city". So if you could get an angle on the dish with a transmitter of sufficient power, you could feed your own signal into whatever channel. "Hauling equipment up to the roof without getting caught" and "having haul-able equipment" are the technical challe…

Thanks for the details! (But would you need to haul equipment up to the roof? Couldn’t you insert your transmitter anywhere in the line of sight?)

Yeah, I just assume "roof" cuz that's where antennas will be. That kind of thing is as close to "tight beam" as can be managed with antennas, usually; and that can be quite small.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#32

Post by jessaustin »

leephillips wrote: post #25
h2odragon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TV stations used a big transmitter up on the Sears tower for their real signal. That got fed by a little microwave dish antenna pointed out to a relay "in the city". So if you could get an angle on the dish with a transmitter of sufficient power, you could feed your own signal into whatever channel. "Hauling equipment up to the roof without getting caught" and "having haul-able equipment" are the technical challe…

Thanks for the details! (But would you need to haul equipment up to the roof? Couldn’t you insert your transmitter anywhere in the line of sight?)

Not an expert, but some lines of sight stretch from the top of one building to the top of another. Chicago doesn't have any mountains nearby, so those lines would just extend out into space and never touch the ground.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#33

Post by steviedotboston »

mattl wrote: post #30
post-it wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but pre-"everyone is online always". Even things that happened in 2005, at the start of Reddit and Digg and well into the reign of MySpace, weren't summarized and consolidated as efficiently as they are today.

Sure. But we don't describe pre-smartphone as pre-telephone.

yeah i dont see whats so hard about speaking accurately.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#35

Post by mattl »

h2odragon wrote: post #24
mattl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wasn't pre-Internet though. This happened in 1987. EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983" -- people who know more about this than you.

BBS was the thing then. Compuserve and such. Talker BBS chat boards run on "OMG WTF is that" stacks of C64 hardware (look up "commodore 64 1Megabyte RAM") or gronkulicious clusters of RBBS hosts. There were UUCP gateways to netnews an mail built out of ignorance and Qbasic by some insane hacker but that was bout as deep as "internet" penetrated. "Joliet One" had a 3b2 but they were pretty restrictive with their feeds…

I mean, some people were using BBS but there are academics and others using the internet.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#36

Post by bluedevil2k »

0des wrote: post #20
joezydeco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The movie is an excellent piece of early cyberpunk. They were doing the "operator get me out of here" two decades before The Matrix. The British TV interview show is meh. The American/ABC remake even more meh.

I celebrate the guy's entire catalog, anyway, let's get down to business - If you like Max Headroom, another great classic that you may or may not remember from that era is Alien Nation (which also stood the test of time)

That’s screaming for a remake. The original movie and TV series have been lost to time but the story is compelling and could easily be part of some procedrual drama with added flair today. Or even a 10 episode season on HBO with a grittier feel to it (more sour milk in other words).

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#37

Post by setpatchaddress »

mattl wrote: post #8
dangle1 wrote: post #2

It's always fascinating seeing the internet catalog and consolidate knowledge, especially regarding events that occurred pre-internet. Back when these events happened, a blurb appeared on TV news and in papers, but there was no easy way to get the big picture as the investigations evolved.

This wasn't pre-Internet though. This happened in 1987. EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983" -- people who know more about this than you.

The internet effectively did not exist in 1987. Even the most tech savvy people didn’t have access.

That didn’t start to change until the early 90’s. Al Gore’s contribution was actually important.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#38

Post by 0des »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #36
0des wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I celebrate the guy's entire catalog, anyway, let's get down to business - If you like Max Headroom, another great classic that you may or may not remember from that era is Alien Nation (which also stood the test of time)

That’s screaming for a remake. The original movie and TV series have been lost to time but the story is compelling and could easily be part of some procedrual drama with added flair today. Or even a 10 episode season on HBO with a grittier feel to it (more sour milk in other words).

> sour milk

Just trying to catch a buzz man :) Cheers!

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#39

Post by BoxOfRain »

beaner wrote: post #6

Of all the conspiracy theories out there, this one, to me, has the highest coverage-to-interestingness ratio. It just seems like a teen hacked an AV system and did a goofy presentation. I'm surprised that type of thing isn't more common, and I'm befuddled as to why this one gets so much attention.

>I'm surprised that type of thing isn't more common

I'd guess that interfering with a digital TV signal today is considerably harder than an old analogue TV signal.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#40

Post by mattl »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #37
mattl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wasn't pre-Internet though. This happened in 1987. EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983" -- people who know more about this than you.

The internet effectively did not exist in 1987. Even the most tech savvy people didn’t have access. That didn’t start to change until the early 90’s. Al Gore’s contribution was actually important.

Public access starts in the late 80s with things like The World and Netcom, but people were posting on the Internet in the 1980s. There's http://olduse.net where you can go and read old USENET posts from the era.
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