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Edge of Darkness
1985 · TV series · 53 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Troy Kennedy Martin
Environmental activist Emma Craven is murdered in front of her father, local police inspector Ronald Craven. Investigating the death leads him through a haunting revelation of the murkiness of British nuclear policy of the 1980s.
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6 comments on Hacker News
I used one casually at "Systime", a UK DEC OEM. The research department where I had a desk was run by John Bondi, the son of Herman Bondi, a genius Astrophyicist who backed the wrong horse in "steady state" universe theory. Systime R&D got their hands on one, and made it available for people to play on. I didn't code on it but I had fun in the paint program.
There was a bootstrap dependency on the UCSD-p system which ran on Apple hw and meant a compiler existed which could be tooled to write Lisa code in Pascal. Compared to UCSD-p Lisa was chalk-and-cheese. Tool you make things with not the same as tool they become.
I have to say, alongside the Vax 11/780 we were coding network stacks on, the lisa was just amazing. It was completely intuitive, although I did watch and follow the on-lisa video presentation on how to use it.
I have no idea where they got it from because the Lisa was not easy to buy in the UK. I never saw another one after that. I used an ICL (three rivers) Perq for a while, and I think Lisa was riffing on ideas expressed in that machine and in the symbolics LISP machine and the XEROX Parc work. The future exploded into workstations shortly after. Whitechapel and others.
Systime had other cool things, like metal stripe guided 4 wheel robotic shuttles to carry the production process between stages. I mean now that would be an autonomous AI system with vision but at the time it was really simple to just lay down some metal tape on the floor and give them guidance on how to deal with low bandwidth radar "you are in my path" signals.
Systime went under, they were involved in a scam breaching the ITAR regulations selling DEC compatible stuff to the USSR, and in copying DEC IPR in hardware beyond the licence agreement. The headquarters was an iconic 1980s Leeds building and features in the 1985 TV series dystopian nuclear thriller "edge of darkness".
Systime, a UK based DEC var and terminal maker was busted copying VAX boards to on-sell to the SU when DEC couldn't under ITAR restrictions. They sold clones with DEC boards and decided to up the profit by cloning the DEC boards.
Systime was doing fine selling VT100 compatible terminals but went seeking bigger bucks. I think the VAX was a sweetspot for them while it lasted. They went bust in the end.
Their headquarters in Leeds was a futuristic (for the 1980s) building with magstripe guided parts moving robots, a fantastic works cafeteria, the owners helicopter parked outside, and featured in a nuclear missile thriller TV series called "edge of darkness" -I worked at Leeds Uni on a systime funded research project and spent time there. Nice people in the research labs, smart, motivated.
> TV shows such as Edge of Darkness (1985), which has the principal character Jedburgh dying of radiation sickness following contact with plutonium.
Jedburgh actually brings together two subcritical lumps of plutonium in his hands, and causes a criticality incident.
I have heard of this show, and speaking of gritty late-Cold-War-era series that still hold up, I think Edge of Darkness should be up there. It was remade into a terrible action film in 2010, but the original TV series from 1985 is a masterpiece of plotting and pacing, and non-verbal storytelling.
I think the first artistically ambitious TV show I remember coming out of the US was 'Twin Peaks'.
I've watched GBH a few times since it aired and I think it still holds up. Certainly give it a go if you get the chance. The original UK TV version of 'Edge of Darkness' is also still very, very watchable. Some remarkable scenes and performances.
> scenes from that film that will stay with me the rest of my life
I bet that's the most persistent thing you remember from that teacher. Effective education! And probably tipped you away from the idea that a nuclear war might be winnable, and towards disarmament.
Our teacher showed us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Darkness for similar reasons, I think.