I bet techmoan would like to get his hands on one of these presuming they made it into production. Tomorrow's World was pure quality and the presenters were the best they could have been

Tomorrows World was (for me) the epitome of what made the BBC so good back in the day.

This feels like it was shot in one take. A testament for the presenter. She actually knows what she is talking about.

Tomorrows World was THE best tech program ever. It was essential viewing.

Kudos to Judith and all the Tomorrow's World presenters that demonstrated tech LIVE each week!

Really impressive the amount of detail they would go into for stuff like this - back when there was only 3 or 4 channels for people to choose from, a large chunk of the UK population (myself included as a child) would have tuned in not necessarily expecting to understand everything but to know that they would go beyond the high-level marketing and actually try to explain what was going on underneath.

As a Canadian who never saw these shows in original broadcast, I'm so impressed with this. This is definitely a refreshing break, and heads above a lot of the junk put out today. Thanks for this treasure!

The Tomorrow's World presenters really were the best presenters on TV.

I love this. Back from the days when the BBC still made quality and informative programming

Awww Thursday nights after Top of the Pops, I used to love Tomorrows World as a kid. Bring it back BBC!

Wow, imagine being able to store both music and pictures on a single cassette tape and play them back digitally. Tomorrow's world was fantastic and missed by many people.

Can we have a bit of appreciation for the model makers who made those demonstrations of the difference between analogue and digital recording. Sterling work! 👍

The BBC props dept have gone above and beyond for this one

I always liked the professional presentation Judith gave, excellent job.👍♥️

As a youth, I just adored these glimpses into our future, that Tomorrows World provided. One of my favourite TV shows, sadly missed.

Days of work putting all that together - the TWO models were so well made...absolute quality throughout that show.

Her nephew was in my class at school. Was so jealous he had such a cool aunty!

One of the highlights of the TV week back in the day.

Tomorrow's World was ace. And watching back archived clips shows what we lost when it ended.

Respect to Judith - a good presenter. When TV used to have integrity and actually teach the public something useful

Those jvc amps were absolutely sublime. Restored one 2 years ago. Built like a tank and such good sounding.

I love these old programs. A different world and time never to be experienced again , only through these videos and peoples memory’s

Will just add that the quality of these uploads is stunning, just shows what high quality the original video recordings were. They look great in 720p at 50hz de-interlaced! Well done BBC Archives.

Thanks BBC Props Department. You guys really outdid yourselves for literally around a single minute of television. And Judith with the single pan shot!

I'm still waiting for my personal jet pack that Tomorrow's World promised I'd have by 1999!!! 😊

Fascinating! The digital tape recorder as shown here, using a special multi-track head to record the data was never released to my knowledge. The first digital compact cassette system was the DAT recorder, which used a very different approach to recording the data. It was based on video recording technology rather than this multi-track concept. I guess they found this prototype wasn't reliable enough or to expensive or something like that. Later Phillips did introduce the DCC digital cassette recorder, which was backward compatible for playing analog cassettes and used dedicated tape cassettes in a slightly different housing for digital recording. To allow for this however, the data bandwidth limitation of recording on a standard cassette tape was solved through data compression rather than using a type of video head recording.

WOW!! was that all in one take? What a star Judith is!

Looks like an early version of DCC, as DCC also used multitrack recording (8 audio + 1 auxillary data track per side). DCC were released in 1992, 10 years after this episode of Tomorrows World was made.

I see that uploading in 50p is now the standard by the looks of it. Whoever decided this, thank you! It's so nice to see VideoTaped material look how it should instead of being filmized.

I actually remember watching this clip as a kid when it was first broadcast !

Wow!!! The mythical, legendary "3M Digital Mastering System" recorder!! Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame) recorded his 1982 blockbuster album "The Nightfly" on such a machine!! They were riddled with technical problems but when they worked they had a silky-smooth sound unparalleled by any analog recorders of the day! An amazing bit of history here!! They had to move the tape at 45"-inches-per-second in order to record all the digital data required! Plus they used a now-nonstandard digital encoding scheme of 12-bits and 4-bits separately, and something like 50,000 Hz rather than the later 44,100 Hz standard. Absolutely ingenious!

When Tomorrow's World was on, I knew I coming to the end of another long hard week at school as TW used to be shown on Thursday evenings. Also hats off to Judith who handled all that technology so well in one take on live TV, but I do remember there were also a lot of bloopers such as the rain reactive windscreen wipers that failed to spring to life when one of the presenters squirted water on it.

I remember the part with the orange tape! 😀 I was 19 when I saw it in 1982 …

Thanks Judith. Thudith.

Brilliant! I’d missed this particular one; but absolutely started using DAT and Minidisc’s to record ‘hiss-less’ at my home music studio in the 90’s. Interesting though, these days we have plugins (in music production software) to introduce a degree of fake tape hiss, wow and flutter - if we want it (and this can give more depth to an otherwise overly ‘clinically clean’ digital mix).

Nice to go back and watch this to see how technology has evolved.

I love the models that they made to demonstrate to the average Jo how the technology worked

Oh wow, would love to get my hands on the kit shown in this program, the prototype, and those reel to reels are things of beauty too! The real nostalgia though is remembering when TV wasn't dumbed down.

Whilst I was never an avid viewer, and too young for this particular video, I do enjoy watching clips, especially of inventions that became commonplace. To some extent, it's even better watching Tomorrow's World when "Tomorrow" has become yesterday, and things of the future have now become things of the past. It's especially crazy to think the technology we carry around in our pockets (smartphones) encompasses so many different functions - e.g. phone, video phone, internet, music player, video player/TV receiver, GPS, torch, as well as all the different apps etc.

That studio looks amazing, even for today’s standards. Fantastic stuff Also, makes you think how short lived tapes lasted for.

Makes me sad that the BBC that created this sort of quality program, no longer exists. This & other programs were my childhood and I loved them.

Judith was such a pro. Class act.

Only 25 years ago, ppl were still using pens/pensils to rewind/ff cassettes

those old videos are just gold, the way they explain how it works is so simple. as a kid i understood how cassettes worked and i was experimenting on my own. i was born in 90s, so cassettes weren't that new, but still widely used. i tried putting computer data onto tape, but it didn't work that well without proper equipment, however i did manage to record pulses from a TV remote onto cassette. i basically created a "macro" in 90s as kid. i connected 2 extra wires to TV remote's IR LED (one that sends signals) and connected those wires directly into microphone's input. i cut the microphone wire and connceted it directly to that IR LED, so signals were sent from TV remote into cassette player's mic input. this allowed me to record those pulses onto cassette. then i reversed the process and connected IR LED to speaker (player's output) and pointed the LED towards tv ... what do you know, it worked! it was so amazing inventing stuff like that. it wasn't as high tech as the one seen on this video, but it was still cool concept. i also remember some basic games that were on cassettes by using same method, but i think those cassettes needed a special player that had AV (audio video) output and was able to play the cassette back/forth at different speeds.

i can't wait for that to come on sale. Looks great. Just imagine the possibilities!

They should never have stopped/scrapped Tomorrow's World.

Judith Hann, Now 80 and still going strong :-)

So well explained and presented. Excellent stuff. Loved this as a kid.

I worked on Judith's Morris Minor back in the 1990's that was totally analogue (Lechlade-on-Thames)

Very interesting and really well presented!

Seeing Judith takes me back to being a kid and this being on TV. I’m not sure how much I appreciated it as a little lad back then though. Nice to see she’s alive and well.

As a film and TV buff the VHS cassette was a game changer for me. Tape it and watch at your leisure,again and again.

The problem with music on cassettes being four generations old was that by the time they went on sale that particular genre of music had ceased to be popular leading to disgruntled music fans stuck listening to 1920's jazz. Progress is being made however and next year will see cassette owners finally at long last getting the opportunity to listen to Hip Hop.

Judith Hann and the other presenters on TW were a class above.

The size of all the equipment is amazing lol. I think my recollections of Tomorrows world, and it shows here, is that everything was explained in an in dept, but easy to understand, way.

Judith was the standout presenter, but was one of probably one of only two with a science degree - in typical BBC style, most TW presenters were arts graduates. The more recent 'Bang goes the theory' showed how proper science could be made accessible to a TV audience.

Late 20th century BBC at its best demonstrating the difference between analogue and digital recording. (Thanks to skilled prop makers). I don’t recall this tech making it to the consumer. I'm guessing if it did, it was unlikely to have much of a lifecycle, CD’s were introduced at the end of that year (1982). I’m old enough to remember music recording on Vinyl with the added joy in the quiet parts hearing bacon frying in the kitchen next to the recording studio.

Wonderful clear presentation from Judith. No gimmicky fast editing or sneering swipes. The past was a better country.

Woah. Amazing live presentation skills. AND they built two giant working models to demo/explain the tape recording process. Really classy communication here.

Funnily enough, last month's Viz comic magazine had an '8 Ace' strip where a younger version of the 'thirsty family man' is lying on the floor as a kid in the 1970s watching 'Tomorrow's World' with the presenter spouting some rubbish about life in the 21st century being where we will all lead a life of luxury and plenty with dirt cheap electricity. Read on to the final scene in the comic strip, set in the present. A poverty stricken character shivering in a dark freezing wrecked living room, with bust windows, slugs and mildew on the walls and a broken telly.

Haven’t we come such a long way with amazing technology since then.

I think this is what eventually became DCC (digital compact cassette). It wasn't released until 1992. DCC used linear recording with 9 very narrow tracks per side, not helical scanning like video recorders or DAT. But even with 9 tracks bitrate was much too low for uncompressed, CD quality audio so DCC used a lossy compression algorithm that was later standardized as part of mpeg 1. DCC failed in the market. Must have been painful for all those people who worked on the product for such a long time.

Excellent. Especially love the large models of tape going over tape heads.

2:05 No degradation of copies. Here's where the recording industry sat up and took notice.

I am really looking forward to this. I can’t imagine a world where music is digital.

Can you imagine the BBC producing such a programme now ? Clear concise intelligently presented for a knowledgeable audience thirsting for the latest in tech.

43 years ago, I miss those days !

Using the whole width of a tape reminds me of my 4-track recording days using a TASCAM PortaStudio 5 multi-track recorder, albeit that was still only in analogue. It did use the whole width though and it ran faster than normal tape speed

Back when TV presenters had a brain and treated the viewers as if they did too.

Actual facts. Professionally presented. In a clear format. With no hype or ego. What happened? When did it all go wrong.

i can't wait three years for this.

Judith Hann never dumbed down the tech unlike later iterations of TW. There was a time when you learned things from TW. Later on, you just learned about things. I’m glad I saw the Golden Age of TW with Raymond Baxter, Michael Rodd, William Woollard and Judith. I had just missed when James Burke was presenting.

Converted to "computer code", you say? Sounds like the future to me.

Amazing,it’s bound to catch on!

Excellent presentation and explanation

Personally i Still prefer analog. The first deck she used (a model im familiar with) has impeccable tape speed stability and vanishingly low noise.

The birth of Philips DCC!👍

Thursdays, 7:30pm, BBC1 (after Top of the Pops) - essential viewing for me and my siblings. Raymond Baxter, Dr Judith Hann, Mike Rodd, William Woollard, James Burke et al - excellent presenters, of course all demos were live in studio, and no CGI !

And a year after this... CD! lol

I really do hope this digital stuff catches on!

CDs were launched on March 2, 1983 in North America and Europe- only 9 days before this broadcast aired. Digital cassette tapes never stood a chance.

Still got my Cassette deck ....analogue music forever..

Damn, I can't wait for these digital cassettes! Hope they arrive soon.

The days when television respected a viewers intelligence!

The copy of a copy of a copy can sound exactly the same?! Publishers rejoiced!

♥ Take me back to this world. So glad I was fortunate to be a kid and play Cassettes. I want that hi-fi equipment.🙂

I loved tommorows world it was unmissable

Great concept, but it's a shame that we got the watered-down version of DCC, which was capped at 14khz. Owned the Panasonic version, it was okay but a bit of a flop as a format. Ended up using DAT, which was much nicer, though ultimately still a fragile format. All these years later, I'm still using analog cassettes recorded on a top notch Sony deck and couldn't be happier. 🙂

It’s funny now we have Digital that some people want vinyl and cassette tape 😅

I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these!

Brilliant presenting and production

The time and effort that had gone into that that tape head prop too. Proper good. Can you imagine TV being done this well today? I remember looking forward to watching Tomorrow's World (on a Thursday, I think) back in the 1980s as a child. If you want yesterday's quality of Tomorrow's World, one must tune into decent KZfaq channels today.

This is so cool. I was actually recently thinking about if anyone ever did something like this since I thought of how video game code could be put on a cassette and interpreted by a computer and wondered if the same could be done with music to make it higher quality.

God! I actually remember this! I had just left school and was about to start my very first job! Suddenly feel very old!

I used to love watching Tomorrow's World on the BBC here in England in the 1970's/80's, I think it was on at 7pm and followed by Top of the Pops . . . . . memories lol

I guess it never did go on sale, but DAT tapes eventually came into being. DAT was held back by the greedy recording industry that was worried about pirating. They were used as data backup units for PCs and other computers though. I have a DAT tape kicking around somewhere in my attic.

Interesting to see that there was a successful attempt, as demonstrated here by this prototype deck, to record digital audio to standard analog audio cassettes using the same longitudinal multi-track scheme that Philips' DCC format would later employ, with the difference of this unit being demonstrated using standard PCM as CDs & DAT tapes used, I'd presume (rather than the PASC compression DCC would use). I wonder why this never came out 3 years later in the mid 80s, as Judith mentions that it would. I wonder what manufacturer developed this prototype (it's obviously a Japanese company, as mentioned). Even more surprising to see that it has text & graphics display capability too, a la CD+G. And the digital open-reel deck featured at 1:56 is 3M's "Digital Recording System", a 32-track 1" machine (running at a brisk 45 ips tape speed as you can see, most analog open-reel decks like the 2-track 1/4" Studer A80 at 1:15, run at 15 or 30 ips) that was one of the first commercially available digital audio tape recorders introduced by 3M in 1978. It was actually developed by 3M in collaboration with the BBC, who was also developing a digital audio recording system in their research labs prior. 3M also had a 4-track version of the deck using 1/4" tape, which was sold as a bundle with the 32-track machine to recording studios as the "Digital Mastering System" (the 4-track machine could be used as a mixdown deck for final stereo or quadraphonic mastering from tapes played back on the 32-track recorder).

This was BBC at it’s best. This was a prime time evening show. Now the BBC are more interested trash soaps and “if you’ve been affected by this programme, call our helpline” show endings.

Wow I can't wait 3more years for all these engineering marvels!

When they showed this off, they started with the minidisc, with yes, compression but in the end, quality in such a small space. Then DCC started, and when they had to rewind/fast forward, everyone started giggling.