Tank Umatic

The Tank Umatic was probably the eldest Umatic player owned by YSTV. From around 1994/95 it had the job of playing adverts to network and was controlled by the Grapevine BBC computer. It did not have great looks and was treated with little reverence as it made an ideal footrest for whoever was operating the graphics computer (BBC or Amiga) in the control room. The BBC was dislodged from Grapevine duties during 1996 and control was handed over to the already established BBC Schedula which at the time was using a PC as the front end. Owain Davies attempted to incorporate the control of the Tank into the program running on the PC by using the parallel port as the method for device control. This should have been a relative simple task, but for some unknown reason it was unsuccessful.