Word: standardization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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National Geographic maps have long set the standard for cartography. They are so accurate that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill reportedly followed the progress of World War II on them. Under the direction of Chief Cartographer John B. Garver Jr., the map department entered the computer age in 1983 with the acquisition of a specialized computer that enables mapmakers to modify roads, rivers, borders and country names without wholesale revision. Subscribers now receive six poster-size maps a year, each produced by the society's 130 researchers and mapmakers at a cost of $1 million...
...heart of the new features are computer circuits that change standard analog TV signals, which are broadcast as a series of undulating waves, into digital impulses -- strings of 0s and 1s. The digital signals can then be transformed by microprocessors -- tiny computers on silicon chips -- to achieve a variety of exotic effects. When the processing is complete, the signals are changed back to analog for display on an ordinary TV picture tube...
When video signals take numerical form, all sorts of manipulations become possible. In addition to displaying multiple channels, the circuits can freeze frames or zoom in for close-ups. Digital VCRs can repeat sequences in slow motion or fast-forward without the distortion that mars conventional machines. Standard broadcast images can also be improved, up to a point. One video recorder made by NEC reduces interference by using microprocessors to compare successive image frames. By subtracting random elements that appear on one frame but not the other, the circuitry removes snow before it shows up on the screen...
...image quality that will come from attacking the problem at its source: the broadcast signal. American television is transmitted as a succession of images, each containing 525 horizontal lines, that follow one another at 30 frames a second. Japan's public broadcasting system, NHK, has developed a new standard called high- definition television, which widens the screen and more than doubles the number of lines, to 1,125. The result is a picture of extraordinary clarity that compares favorably with 35-mm film...
...their subscribers. Another is to distribute HDTV programming on high-capacity videodisks, much as videotapes are distributed today. A third approach involves splitting the HDTV signal into two parts and transmitting it over two separate broadcast channels. Old TV sets could utilize enough of the signal to provide a standard-quality picture, while an HDTV receiver could display the higher-resolution image...