COW - Computer Originated World

[BVH2000]

Hello form a new member,
I'm the owner of the ex BBC Belfast Northern Ireland COW that Jeff was having trouble remembering earlier in this thread 
It's amazing that over 10 years have passed since I got the beast up and running.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the COW's first appearance on BBC1 at 19:00 introducing the new Wogan evening show. I've extricated the COW from deep storage last night and it seems fine after about 5 years since it was last powered up (cue something exploding now I've mentioned it)
I'll get some pictures a bit later and post them here.
 
Meanwhile the excellent fellows at BBC Wales Presentation went the extra mile and rescued their COW from the basement and got it going to use live to introduce Last weeks Eastenders "flashback" episode. There is a video on vimeo here :- https://vimeo.com/1056578810

The other Nations used archive files to playout :-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLWMHV5-lJY

I hope to post some more cow related trivia soon
cheers for now
Neil Fountain

[BVH2000]

Happy 40th COW day !
Well, BBC Wales are getting their moneys worth from the refurbished COW. 
A nice 40 year tribute and intro into the one show
apologies for the rather naff off screen picture but here is the NI COW being generated live and the Wales COW - also live via Dsat

Ah- ok no pictures - heads off to read how to post a picture again

Wales have just used the COW into Eastenders with a quip about "milking this COW"  

NI COW is unhappy its warmed up and flickering when one of the SEQ cards is accessed - normally an edge con issue so i'm off for a bit of wiggling

Neil

[ppppenguin]

Hi Neil, good to see you here. Thanks for finding that video. My wife also showed me the switchover from the noddy to the COW on Facebook Reels. TVB Europe has covered the Welsh Cow: https://www.tvbeurope.com/live-productio...ve-to-1985

The BECG/Broadcast Engineering Museum will be getting a page in (I think) the April issue of TVB Europe.

Virtually all the faults in the COW at the Broadcast Engineering Museum have been failed 74LS377 chips. Since we still don't have extenders, diagnosis is not easy. I reckon it's got a recurring case of BSE

Neil, for posting pictures, one easy way is to go to "preview" and drag the image file into the box provided for the purpose.

I would like to publicly thank Neil for copying hundreds of EPROMs to files. I actually had to use one last week. I don't know when it went missing, but our COW didn't have one of the EPROMs in the test pattern part of sequence card #10. I managed to find a 27128 and burned a replacement. In fact a 27256 or 27512 (i have plenty of them) would have worked, putting the data in the top half or quarter.

[ppppenguin]

By the way, we now know of five extant COWs.

Neil Fountain
Vintage Wireless Museum, Dulwich
Broadcast Engineering Museum
BBC Wales
John Trenouth (first curator of TV at the Media Museum, Bradford)

Looking at the manual, 12 were certainly made, possibly as many as 14. So that's an impressive survival rate.

[Richard_FM]

I've had a soft spot for the COW, it seemed like a big jump forward after the mechanical globes & even the computerised stripy BBC 2 logo which was looking a bit dated by 1985.

[BVH2000]

Right, Having logged out and back in I can now see the attachments box in the reply screen so hopefully here's some COW pictures

BBC Wales live TX via Dsat of their COW with the NI COW as a direct RGB input
   

The NI COW awakes 
   

The NI COWs original ebay listing picture
   

Thanks for reminding me of the great Eprom backup all 420 of them !

[BVH2000]

re. existing COWs,
The London cow was alive and working 5 years ago according to this old post on twitter
https://x.com/DuncanNewmarch/status/1230552713836015616

as far as I can tell it is crate15 going by the close ups of cards
       

Neil

[ppppenguin]

There's also a GNAT (Generator, Network Analogue Time) in Duncan Newmarch's photo. That's the one with a clock on the blue front panel.

We've recently had a GNAT donated to us. It's missing its front panel but is otherwise in physically pretty good shape. So far I've rescued the DS1287 real time clock (these have an inbuilt lithium cell which is now inevitably flat), but this has corrupted a lot of parameters and I'm struggling to get everything working correctly. I should be getting a copy of the manual today which I hope will help.

PS: The DS1287 was the subject of another thread: https://golbornevintageradio.co.uk/forum...ght=ds1287 I was a bit coy about where it was used then but now I've come clean.

[ppppenguin]

PS: Had a brainwave on restoring some of the GNAT parameters and this is the result.

The GNAT is meant to be locked to MSF. There's an XLR 3 pin male connector for this. We'll either need a suitable MSF receiver or possibly generate a signal that looks like MSF from linear timecode which we have available, locked to GPS. Not sure how to do either of these.

[Mike Watterson]

One decent solar flare and the GPS signals are gone*. Your own atomic clock is actually affordable now, but meanwhile there is MSF.

[* Or the Russians etc]

Edit:
I've some very expensive ovened reference clocks, maybe 5MHz, and it's amazing how close in stability & accuracy some TCXOs are now and of course minuscule size, power consumption and cost in comparison.

I mentioned before that when I was in BBC Belfast the "world" was a painted ball, mirror and a monochrome camera in a corner of a radio continuity announcer's booth/room