[Bluecortina]

The early 1990s were an interesting time as the technology of analogue could be stretched a bit ....
but the Digital answer was not quite there yet!
So we had assorted MACs from the 1980s - about the only one that had any traction was D2MAC as it fiited on cable .... But that did not stop the Europeans for mandating it .....!
We had PAL plus - as demoed on Ch4 - but the super black was a bit of a pain!
And then on the Production side - Snell /BBC R&D Enhanced PAL ...which was almost immdeitely superdcded by SDI SMPTE ST 259M (270 Mbit/s REC601 ) which was just moving out from the labs and was cheaper!
NHK tried to stretch Analogue into HD -(Hi vision) but they were the only ones that got it to work end to end...
(Well there was HD MAC and Eureka 1250 was very good at Production techniques)
and so Leonardo Chiariglione was so frustrated he stopped doing HD and Invented MPEG Video coding...
and NICAM was re -engineered to work at 728 Kbit/secs for Stereo TV sound ...
The ELG was formed - we know it by its 1993 name of DVB - with -S in 1994 and _T in 1997
by which time it was very obvious that the TV world was moving fast to being Digital using standards in Production and emission.. ....
But the early 1990s were full of pseudo analogue things not quite working!!

The early 90's were a very exciting time in tv engineering, there wasn't really a lot of easily accessible information around at the time concerning REC601/656 etc. I had to 'do' acceptance testing of quite a fair bit of digital equipment acting as connected digital islands, working how to do measurement and acceptance was quite a challenge. Even the engineers from the kit manufacturers were scratching their heads at some of the questions I asked, most of them arranged informal meetings at the factory with the actual equipment designers which was often quite an eye opener for me in the best sense. I learned lot from them!