Thomson 8-bit computers, a history

In March 1986, my dad was in the market for a Thomson TO7/70. I have the circled classified ads in “Téo” issue 1 to prove that :)

TO7/70 with its chiclet keyboard and optical pen, courtesy of MO5.com

The “Plan Informatique pour Tous” was in full swing, and Thomson were supplying schools with micro-computers. My dad, as a primary school teacher, needed to know how to operate those computers, and eventually teach them to kids.

The first thing he showed us when he got the computer, on the living room TV, was a game called “Panic” or “Panique” where you controlled a missile, protecting a town from flying saucers that flew across the screen from either side, faster and faster as the game went on. I still haven't been able to locate this game again.

A couple of years later, the TO7/70 was replaced by a TO9, with a floppy disk, and my dad used that computer to write an educational software about top-down additions, as part of a training program run by the teachers schools (“Écoles Normales” renamed to “IUFM“ in 1990).

After months of nagging, and some spring cleaning, he found the listings of his educational software, which I've liberated, with his permission. I'm currently still working out how to generate floppy disks that are usable directly in emulators. But here's an early screenshot.

Later on, my dad got an IBM PC compatible, an Olivetti PC/1, on which I'd play a clone of Asteroids for hours, but that's another story. The TO9 got passed down to me, and after spending a full summer doing planning for my hot-dog and chips van business (I was 10 or 11, and I had weird hobbies already), and entering every game from the “102 Programmes pour...” series of books, the TO9 got put to the side at Christmas, replaced by a Sega Master System, using that same handy SCART connector on the Thomson monitor.

But how does this concern you. Well, I've worked with RetroManCave on a Minitel episode not too long ago, and he agreed to do a history of the Thomson micro-computers. I did a fair bit of the research and fact-checking, as well as some needed repairs to the (prototype!) hardware I managed to find for the occasion. The result is this first look at the history of Thomson.

Finally, if you fancy diving into the Thomson computers, there will be an episode coming shortly about the MO5E hardware, and some games worth running on it, on the same YouTube channel.

I'm currently working on bringing the “Teo” TO8D emulator to Flathub, for Linux users. When that's ready, grab some games from the DCMOTO archival site, and have some fun!

I'll also be posting some nitty gritty details about Thomson repairs on my Micro Repairs Twitter feed for the more technically enclined among you.

System Settings shell changes

 While Jon McCann made changes to the System Settings UI, I was busy implementing an animated notebook, to make the switch between panels, overview and search less jarring.

Video on YouTube.

Here's a list of what we fixed:

• Avoid scrollbars at all costs on startup (made possible by some GTK+ sizing bug fixes)
• Make the default window bigger, while supporting small displays (800x600 displays should now be usable)
• Bigger icons to match the Shell's overview
• Better layout of search results
• Animated transitions between panels, overview and search results

Before

After

There will most likely be more tweaks of the UI between now and the GNOME 3.6 release, which I'll make sure to let you know about.

PS: Before you ask, we cannot animate window size changes. Hopefully this will be possible in the future.

Update: Fixed a double-negative. Also note that there are some differences between my screenshots and reality, like the separators, as my system wasn't fully updated.

YouTube playback will suck again

If you've seen the comments on this PiTiVi bug, you're probably already aware that YouTube/Google strongly disapprove of any breach to their terms of service.

We thought that Totem was living in a soft, gray, area by using YouTube GData API to do video searches, and then accessing direct streams that were of the quality expected by users, and in formats that meant out-of-the-box support for most Linux distributions (eg. using Web-M).

Turns out not. I won't make a whole scene about the way that this problem was brought up to me, but let's say that it wasn't the way I would have expected a corporation like Google dealing with things.

After a multitude of e-mails back and forth, I'm afraid that YouTube stuck to its guns, and I was repeatedly told about the "supported" solutions (embedding Flash was even proposed as a solution!).

So Totem will soon be playing your YouTube videos in crappy quality. Some of you with faster computers and better connections will be switching from full-HD streams to 176x144 videos.

If you want decent desktop integration with high-quality streams, feel free to "star" this GData bug report.

And for something different now

Because it looks better in fullscreen, with acceleration, and you can save it if you want to keep it. Totem now with a "Save Copy..." menu item, and a playlist parser that knows about video websites.

The ever present Xan is demo man.

You'll need quvi (for its library) and the master of totem-pl-parser (that should even work with older versions of Totem) for the video website support. The "Save" menu item lives in Totem master, scheduled for GNOME 3.

No more stuttering

Today, as some of you guessed from my teaser yesterday, I finished implementing on-disk buffering in Totem, using playbin2's new features.

Using Totem in master with this gstreamer patch, Totem will start playing back videos as soon as enough buffering has been done on disk.

Note that this will only work for QuickTime and FLV streams, but that means that the YouTube Totem plugin and streaming trailers from Apple's website just got better, and should allow us to implement stream saving very soon.

Fast YouTube Fast

Thanks to Edward and Tim, who fixed a few locking and threading problems in the Python support for Totem, the YouTube plugin is now faster and doesn't lock up the UI when receiving results.


Fetch it in Totem 2.24.2.