![]() (Calling the FCC/IC and asking would have been suspicious) The old 80’s/90’s studio links were pretty easy to take over.įirst you would have to scout out where the studio link transmitter was in the 2ghz band at the office for the tv station the feed comes from. Posted in classic hacks, Retrotechtacular Tagged chicago, Max Headroom, tv, tv hack Post navigation ![]() This isn’t the first time we’ve brought you a TV hack from the 1980s, earlier this year we brought you the tale of some very clever overlaying of messages from the independent Solidarity trade union on the TV transmissions of the Communist Polish state. ![]() First is the short outing on EGN, below that the longer one on WTTV. Surely we have readers who are intimately familiar with the television broadcasting equipment of the time.īelow the break we’re showing you both fake intrusions into the Chicago airwaves. Of course, we’d love to hear how you would have done it in the comments below. ![]() Next year sees the 30th anniversary of the event, it would be fascinating if the perpetrator would mark it by anonymously revealing how it was achieved. But in the 1980s a studio would still have been an analogue affair so there would have been more opportunities to insert an unauthorized feed. It is very unlikely that a similar stunt could be performed today, with entirely digital TV studios and easy access to encryption technologies for external links to transmitter sites. The stations involved conducted full investigations at the time and failed to locate a culprit, perhaps they should have been looking for that old campervan with the antennae on its roof. A couple of hours later on WTTW a rerun of a episode was again interrupted with the same fake, this time speaking for a while before, if his performance wasn’t already bizarre enough, being spanked by a woman whose face is off camera.Īs a piece of television history it’s an intriguing mystery, though since so little is known about the mechanism through which it was achieved it hasn’t achieved the notoriety in the technical world that you might expect. On the night of the 22nd of November 1987, viewers of WGN were watching a sports program when the screen went blank and they were treated to a few seconds of a slightly home-made dancing in front of those trademark moving lines. But that wasn’t the whole story of his appearances, back to that unexplained hack of Chicagoland TV. The character proved to be something of a hit, with a TV spin-off series, VJing, adverts, and more. Meanwhile the reporter escapes, recovers, and prevails over the villains. They scrap the computer and it falls into the hands of a pirate TV station operating from a decrepit campervan, the Alphabetti-eating proprietor of which turns the character it contains into a TV sensation. The network try to cover it up by producing a computerized facsimilie of the reporter which turns out to be an embarassing failure. An investigative journalist seeking to uncover the sinister owners of his network (they run speeded-up adverts with the unfortunate side-effect of causing overweight viewers to explode) is pursued, causing a road accident in which he is injured by a collision with a safety barrier. He strung upon us by rising out of a title screen full of static in the Channel 4 TV movie : 20 Minutes into the Future. The real (Fair use) Via Wikimedia Commons.If you were a bored British teenager and future Hackaday writer vegging out in front of your parents’ TV on an April night in 1985, you’d have caught ’s genesis. He also made unscheduled showings on two Chicago TV stations in an audacious hack that has never been explained and whose culprit has never been found. He looks a little quaint for viewers with a few decades viewing experience of CGI, but in his day he was cutting-edge cypberpunk TV. was a supposedly computer generated TV show host and VJ with a pseudomechanical stutter, a slightly blocky rendered head, and a moving background of rendered lines. ![]() Those of you with long memories and a compulsive TV viewing habit might remember, a quirky piece of TV ephemera from the late 1980s and early 1990s. ![]()
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