1985 BBC Special: A Change In The Weather

The BBC special A Change in The Weather focuses on the cutting-edge technology of the time used to collect, transmit, collate and interpret weather and forecast data, and the growing use of computer technology to design and present the regular forecast to the public.

Two years after this television special aired, BBC meteorologist Michael Fish and the Met Office came under fire for failing to forecast the Great Storm of 1987 correctly.

I discovered this on the tail end of a home-recorded VHS tape of Dirty Harry (found at a local jumble sale). Clip contains ad for Miami Vice, BBC special 'A Change in The Weather', next day's schedule, station ID, anthem & close.... then a full minute of Neil Pye's favourite song; 'Ooooooooooooooooh'

NOTE - At 07:30, there is talk of a new computer that does "400 million calculations a second". This is on par with the cutting edge of technology at the time. The Motorola 68020, a 32-bit microprocessor released in 1984, offered 4 MIPS at 20 MHz (4 MIPS = 4 million instructions per second). 10 years later, in 1994, they released the Motorola 68060 which could handle 88 MIPS at 66 MHz, but by then Intel had overtaken Motorola and were poised to dominate the commercial market for years to come (first Intel Pentium chip, also released in 1994: 188 MIPS at 100 MHz). A modern X-Box has a chip that can handle 19,200 MIPS at 3.2 GHz, and the latest Intel chip can handle 177,730 MIPS at 3.33 GHz.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• 1985
• bbc
• weather
• television
• special
• great
• storm
• 1987

[bloggerheads]

@DBIVUK Wow. Thanks for your informative tweet. :o)

[DBIVUK]

This was Monday, 18 February 1985, from about 11:39 PM until 12:04 AM on Tuesday 19 February. This was the first day of the new BBC One idents (the 'Computer Originated World'); 'Wogan' had begun earlier in the day and the 'Eastenders' mentioned in the trail was the first episode. The BBC was clearly very proud of 'A Change in the Weather' because they showed it three times: 12:10 - 12:30 PM on BBC One, and 7:30 - 7:50 PM on BBC Two were the others.