[pjc50]

Little period details:

- strobing CRT monitors that don't line up with the frequency of the TV camera

- PCs in the internet cafe, Macs in media, Acorn Archimedes (with ARM processor!) in schools

- first thing to do with the global communications network is send a dumb message to the US President

- indexed-color images; you can see in one case when she changes windows and the colours go wrong in the background as the palette is swapped.

- very early HTML without even a DOCTYPE

- "all secondary schools are to be linked to the internet by the end of the year" (I would put money on that not having happened for several more years)

[onion2k]

strobing CRT monitors that don't line up with the frequency of the TV camera

I studied Broadcast Engineering for my degree back in 1997, and you could definitely shift the input signal to match the refresh rate of a CRT screen or a flourescent tube light on the Sony BetaCam TV studio cameras I worked with. I reckon the BBC would have been working with similar or better tech in 1995. I wonder if this might have been a directorial choice to show what viewers expect rather than any technical issue.

[colanderman]

While television refresh rates on both sides of the pond matched local grid frequency, did computer monitor refresh rates necessarily match? VGA for example supported 60 Hz but not 50 Hz according to Wikipedia [1]. So in the UK, I would think you could sync with fluorescent lights, or VGA monitors, but not both (unless you recorded at say 10 fps).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array#Technical...

[worldofmatthew]

In most scenes, the refresh rate is matched (Slightly off from the presenters computer in the internet cafe with the computer all most all other computers in the cafe set to a different refresh rate).

[ChrisRR]

It's more likely that either they were working to a budget, or just didn't have the time to sync. I doubt they intentionally wanted the flicker

[jameshart]

I wonder if the ‘linking schools to the internet’ was more about the rollout of the .sch.uk domain name than about actual physical internet connectivity. In 1995 ‘getting on the internet’ was still largely a case of dial up to an ISP, and while schools in general probably had a PBX system on an ISDN, turning those into ‘internet’ was not just a case of enabling a data plan.

And then on the school end, they might have had a lab of computers, but 1) probably Acorn Archimedes at best and 2) probably on an econet rather than Ethernet LAN if networked at all; so getting those computers ‘linked up’ to the internet was going to be tricky.

So your ‘linked to the internet’ school would more likely be one PC in an office on dialup to an ISP for email.

Or maybe a simple webpage hosted by a friendly local university?

[johannes1234321]

> - first thing to do with the global communications network is send a dumb message to the US President

For me that also was about the first website I visited back around that time when I had friends over, who didn't know Internet to show how easy you can get there from Europe.

Second stop was the local city councils page, and checking why my physics teacher was supporting for proposals as counselor.