Ten Years of Telidon -------------------- I've already written - and published - several articles and essays about my extended project to recover and restore Telidon videotex, and given lengthy talks, such that there is little enough I could say here, that I haven't already said somewhere else.[1] But it doesn't seem right to let this anniversary pass entirely unremarked, either. January 2015 it was, when our University Archivist presented me with an interesting problem: our Art Gallery was planning a retrospective exhibition honoring the life's work of local artist, the late Glenn Howarth, and wanted to include examples of his early digital artworks alongside the paintings and drawings that made up the bulk of his ouevre. This wasn't quite as straightforward as it might sound, since nobody had seen any of these artworks in decades, but it was thought the digital files might be found on one or more of the over 200 floppy disks his estate had donated to the Archives some three years previously. Would I be able to help? At first I wasn't sure. What sort of digital images could Howarth have been making, starting back in '81 or so? Heck, GIFs hadn't even been invented back then! That was before the Amiga, before MacPaint ... But there were some clues on the floppy disk labels, initialisms like "NAPLPS" that were new to me. And as I started digging into it, I realized there was this whole Galapagos Island of tech, called "Telidon", that had pretty much fallen off the map. So much so, that I, despite a longstanding interest in the history of computing, had never heard of it before. I have already told the story of how I restored Glenn Howarth's digital artworks elsewhere,[2] so will say no more about it here. Ditto for the years following, when the project ramped up to include dozens more artists, and many tens of thousands more Telidon graphics files. But there are a couple of things I could say about my Telidon recovery work, that will never make it into one of my articles or talks. For starters, what an incredible gift this project, or series of projects, has been! It arrived at exactly the right time, when I had been passed over for a promotion at work and was looking for some new challenges. And it was pretty much tailor made for me, bringing together two sides of my academic career I had thought would always remain apart: the first ten years or so, when I was deeply immersed in visual art, and the years after I changed direction and became a library technologist. And moreover, what good fortune, to have dumped in my lap an entire era of Canadian computing and art history that has never been the subject of serious academic study in the years since it ended. Finding something new to write about, that hasn't already been exhaustively covered, can be a huge challenge for academics seeking to launch their careers. I, who am at best a second-class academic (librarian with no doctoral degree), just lucked into Telidon. The world isn't fair, but I guess sometimes that can work in your favour. There was just the right amount of difficulty, too, to make the project pretty much perfect as a case study in digital preservation. Not just a case of, make a disk image, extract the files, and run them in an emulator. No sir. There were all kinds of complications, even after I'd tracked down the files, starting with the fact there were two distinct versions of the Telidon encoding, the second of which was (by design) not backwards compatible with the first. And while software still existed (barely) that could render the second version, the only thing that could render the first version was this extremely rare computing hardware, almost unobtanium, called variously a "Telidon decoder" or "Telidon terminal" depending on whether it had a built-in CRT, or not. So all the tricks of the digital preservationist's trade came into play, including hardware restoration, format migration, data recovery, software reconstruction, and, yes, emulation. And difficulty is good: The more difficult the project is, the more things there are to write and talk about, which is the name of the game in academia. Over the years, I've done my share of writing and talking, when I wasn't doing the work I was writing and talking about. And I'd be lying if I said the smallish notoriety it has bestowed upon me in my field isn't at all gratifying. Funnily enough though, I didn't have to do any of it. As I'm not a 'real' academic, only a librarian, 'publish or perish' doesn't really apply to me. My job is flexible enough to allow me to pursue oddball projects like this one, but only as a sideline, and it doesn't count for too much in my annual performance reviews. (Not complaining though, that flexibility is in itself a huge privilege.) "The work is its own reward" is quite the cliche, but in this case at least it happens to be (mostly) true. References ---------- 1. See sections Telidon, Writings, and Talks, here: https://www.durno.ca 2. "Machine stitched into a corner of the Canadian modern age flag ..." https://durno.ca/Howarth-stitched.pdf Sun Jan 12 11:27:59 PST 2025