Early CD Extras
March 26th, 2004One (annoying) feature of the modern CD is the stupid PC extras (videos, secret web links), of relatively little quality or merit, that come hidden away on them and serve little purpose except annoy you when you try and play it on your computer. They’re crap. But much cooler are their precursors - Spectrum games encoded in audio on Vinyl LPs. I don’t know why, especially as the data would have sounded awful if played by accident on your hi-fi, and most of the extras were crap (though the HAIL SATAN one is a gem), but there’s something wonderfully woo and retro about them.
March 27th, 2004 at 10:22:13
On a similar note, I can remember seeing pages and pages of what were apparently programming code (presumably for the BBC Micro) on Teletext back in the early/mid 80s. They were always hidden up around the 800 page mark, along with all the engineers’ test pages.
I wasn’t geeky enough to own a computer back then, so I never found out what the programs were. Mind you, I was obviously geeky enough to spend time flicking through Teletext pages endlessly, looking for little treats… ;-)