week 4 - and now for the weather

something a little less existential this week.

i'm obsessed with the Weather Channel. as is probably pretty clear, i'm a big fan of vaporwave aesthetics and the designs and items that said aesthetics originate from, but i have a special spot in my heart for music from the weather channel. and this lead to a deep dive into the software and hardware used in weather broadcasting in the 90s.

This article proved an enlightening read about the WeatherSTAR4000, which stored all of its contents on RAM, among other fascinating details. According to wikipedia, the first versions of this machine were designed to output in text-only mode but later moved onto graphical depictions of the local forecast. As described by the user [techknight] who took it upon themselves to reverse engineer the machine, it could be described as 'basically a 68K single board computer environment with simple graphics'. which i just think is SO cool.

Plus, if anyone's interested in recreating their own personal little weather station with weather from anywhere in the United States (complete with music!), here are a couple of neat links:

these two are WS4000 simulators (one desktop and one browser) and provide a pretty authentic experience. from what i understand, an analog satellite feed was provided to the machine containing the software which then output graphics. however as mentioned before this software was volatile in that it was only stored in RAM and not in any long term storage on the computer, which meant that it is essentially lost after the machine loses power. again, not my wheelhouse. i'll let this page do the heavy lifting.

and here's a cool article providing a pretty solid argument as to why The Weather Channel of the 1990s was the pinnacle of television programming.

that's all for this week!