1977 – 1993retired
Apple II
“It put color graphics and VisiCalc in a plastic case, and never stopped being useful.”
“1250 lines of European ambition, politely ahead of its time and sadly early to the party”
HD-MAC was the European Commission's 1986 attempt, under the Eureka 95 project, to bring high-definition television to Europe through the MAC family of analogue standards. It blended an analogue video signal with digital sound and decoding assistance data, promising 1250 lines at 50 fields per second in a widescreen 16:9 picture. That was a genuinely bold vision of the future at a time when most viewers had never eve
It was kinder to its audience than many formats: ordinary D2-MAC receivers could still decode the signal, just without the extra resolution and with a few visible artifacts, while full quality required a special HD-MAC tuner. By 1993 it had been retired, leaving behind the memory of an ambitious attempt to leapfrog into high definition before the digital era made its own plans.
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“It put color graphics and VisiCalc in a plastic case, and never stopped being useful.”
“Enhanced in name, eternal in our hearts — lowercase letters never looked so good.”
“News in the blanking interval: America typed its answer to Ceefax, then the sets stopped listening.”