Satellite Local Forecast

Forecast for national cities aired on The Weather Channel in 1989 during a period in which the cable system's Weatherstar 3000 was malfunctioning. When the units were not operating properly, cable viewers would receive this national feed. The music is "Cool Winds" by Mark O'Connor. All copyrights acknowledged to respective holders.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Weather
• Channel
• 1989
• Local
• Forecast
• TWC

[pvx]

@jelewis2 I think this forecast might of been generated by a Digital VT220 or similar terminal, using its composite video output (!), and having the terminal display the text in its double-height character mode (a feature available since the VT100). The giveaway is that the top half of the characters are drawn, then the second lower half (done by sending a escape code to enable the top-half chars and then the line of text, then again, but with another code to enable the bottom half.)

[joshua87901]

You need to dispute the copyright claim for fair use :|

[GayTexasBoy]

In my opinion, the weather channel was at its best from the time I started watching it in June of 1992 until sometime in 1996. I know it sucks now, everyone agrees with that, but I am sure we all disagree when it started to go downhill.

[HereWasNicole]

Of course, Kansas City finally shows up, but on a GLITCHED map! *headdesk*

[carrierpilot1357]

this is probably the 30th one i've tried to watch without audio 'cause of wmg

[jelewis2]

Someone from the Unix world could well say it looks like a bash script or a cron job, and it would be more accurate because unlike MS-DOS, Unix-like operating systems have been used in the headend equipment for TWC: IRIX on WeatherStar XL and FreeBSD on the current IntelliStar; WeatherStar 4000 and earlier, including the WeatherStar III in this video, had no OS and had limited hard-coded capabilities for handling the feed from the NWS...I prefer the old style because it looks raw and unfiltered.

[jelewis2]

According to Wikipedia the WeatherStar 4000 and earlier had no OS (they likely had a few hard-coded programs for working with the NWS feed instead of a full-fledged OS); meanwhile the WeatherStar XL used IRIX on SGI hardware and the current IntelliStar uses FreeBSD on an x86 computer, and these alone can mimic the design of the TWC national feed on the headend, although they do provide less impression of getting the raw unfiltered feed that the WeatherStar III and earlier gave.

[megamanfan3]

You can say that again. This is the second video I watched that the WMG disabled the audio.

[lamarr912]

Damned WMG.

[kenshin891]

I would imagine so. Until early the next year, when the 4000 debuted, It was the only weatherstar in existance.