NBNTV ~ 60 Years of Tech

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 Preface

This is the story of NBN Television's progression from the age of terrestrial broadcasting until the era of entertainment on demand. 

There is nothing unique about the station's early operations. Equipment purchases and strategies were no different from any other regional television station during those years. NBN excelled, however, in its final decades. First, with its bold approach to aggregation. Then by agility, in its adaptation of an ageing legacy Traffic system called "Equinox" to handle multi-feed, multi-channel operations well into the age of automated solid-state video playout.

The significance of NBN's success, and that of its regional competitors, can be measured by a telling statistic when, at the industry's height, Sydney’s Nine broadcast its single programme feed to 4.5 million viewers via four transmitters, while NBN Television served 2 million viewers via SIX feeds through a network of over 55 remote transmitter and relay sites.  

When operations moved to Honeysuckle in 2021 with its famous Mosbri Crescent studio demolished, NBN ceased to exist as an entity. But it's technical legacy - the topic of this article - persists in the example it had set, not only to owners Nine but to an entire industry. 

[When] Nine assumed responsibility for producing 15 dedicated local Nine News bulletins to viewers in its regional markets in Queensland, Southern New South Wales, and regional Victoria...[it used] a split signal model which had been in place at NBN, Nine’s wholly owned Northern New South Wales affiliate, for almost 30 years.

    ~ Michael Thurlow: A History of Regional Commercial Television Ownership and Control  Pg 405

Delving back into a company's past can raise questions, the most interesting being: "What was the thinking behind key decisions?" In NBN's case, the thinking was always clear and pertinent due to a deeply experienced, small, tight-knit executive team. Their focus was by necessity transactional, informed by ratings, revenue, and return on investment (ROI). Or, as one tech manager reacted when asked for descriptive input for a tender, not pricing: "Sorry, I assumed you meant costs. It's always been price first, don't care how it's done!"

To describe how NBN evolved through its multiple identities while dominating Australia's fourth-largest market is a task with far too many threads to follow. As it grew from a single channel start-up broadcaster in 1962 to a telecommunications company forty years on, NBN Television confronted and overcame an evolving technological landscape. It did so with relatively few staff - all highly-skilled, long-term employees promoted through the ranks - and a small, tight-knit technical team.

Although the narrative could follow those threads as separate timelines, the subject is of such scope that I've chosen to present it as a linear history, a master timeline, each period describing all the threads together as they unfolded. Furthermore, due to the (necessarily) speculative nature of much written below, it will often revert to the first-person "I" and the inclusive "we" - whereby it refers to the author, me, and the reader, you.

This history will be told therefore as a single thread, decade by decade. Starting in the 1960s, when a television station was built from scratch and the staff learned television as it happened. In the 1970s a colour station was built beside the original plant as management and accounts discovered that technology's ROI was on a rapidly shrinking scale, that old machinery lifetimes were a thing of the past. During the 1980s the infiltration of computers into formerly electro-mechanical processes was confirmation that this industry was in a permanent state of change. In the 1990s NBN began down the path of multiplying programme feeds, pushing innovation to the limit. Finally, this millennium, digital television and computerised operations swept the old analogue technology from our lives forever.

Apart from anecdotes and occasional first-person commentary (where facts cannot be definitively stated), this account will be largely technical. 

Though not involved in design, planning, or deployment of NBN's intricate playout systems, the author observed its evolution as junior member of the technical team. If the reader's expertise allows them corrections or explanations, they are invited to do so in the comments section, or by email for incorporation. And although the team leaders who drove these projects were vastly more knowledgeable and capable of laying out (far more accurately!) the complexities described below, that is their story to tell (and they are welcome to tell it here). I am writing this in case a most deserving piece of Australia television history is never told at all. 

Final note: Terms vary between countries, almost to the extent that regionalised glossaries are needed. For this article, in Australia, "Presentation" is the operator who switched sources to air by following the telecast log delivered directly from a "Traffic Department/" Presentation might also be called "Continuity" (a term rarely if ever used) but in the US, "Presentation" is more likely to be termed "Master Control." In our context however, "Master Control" is a room akin the the central nervous system where everything is monitored, adjusted, or controlled, and incoming feeds received and redirected, and so on. "Traffic" in Australian refers to a department that creates the station's programme log. From day one NBN had separate Master Control and Presentation rooms, defined as above, despite the installation being largely handled by American RCA engineers. This follows the naming convention used by British television, aka "Pres," and/or "Transmission Controller" (TC) or "Playout Director."

Introduction

The catalyst that set NBN on its path to not only survive but outstandingly succeed in the subsequent 25 years was a political decision by the Australian government. As The Heydays peaked in the 1980s, the government chose to force regional television broadcasters to compete for revenue in their thinly-scattered communities across vast tracts of the country. 

Like every other non-metropolitan station, NBN immediately foresaw a protracted period of expansion that would drain resources, stretch staff to its limits, and doom the company to years of unprofitable operation. For NBN the deadline was 31st December, 1991, before which it must deploy a network of some thirty remote sites to serve the entirety of northern NSW, along with the Central Coast and Gold Coast.

Forced to extend its programme into two competing NSW markets - and though it might never recover this gambit's initial costs - it chose to enable "breakaways" or windows: individualised programme feeds to major regional markets. The first implementation was three - one each to the Hunter, north west, and north coast. Then four feeds when the north coast was split into mid-north and far north. Automation enabled a Gold Coast feed in 1994, then two years later Central Coast viewers became the sixth market to receive their local commercials and news.

But that wasn't enough. In subsequent decades the station took on the ABC's Asia Pacific programme handling from an in-house presentation suite, delivered via its satellite earth station behind the Mosbri studios. It built a digital post-production company that captured national clients, such as Woolworths. Staff technicians constructed country's first high-definition OB vehicle. All while reinventing itself as a Telco and undergoing multiple ownership changes. NBN even claims fame to be the world's first broadcaster to deliver television programme over an IP network, via a digital broadcast backbone feeding the transmitter network while growing the telco business. It claimed a world record for Telethon revenue (per head) collecting (inflation adjusted 2025) approximately $50 million over 40 years. 

In the years from 1962 to 1990, we try describe in as much surviving detail possible the station inventory; to place whatever can be confirmed, or be reasonably surmised, on the record. But from 1990 onwards the scope broadens with our best attempt to explain what drove the company in the directions it eventually took, and how it managed to thrive during an industry-wide decline.

In short, NBN was governed during its final two decades by an inflexible rule: every gain of service would be achieved with playout's operational and staffing overheads at pre-aggregation level!

A Word About Television

Television is an incredibly complex business. Equally so in those decades before automation combined operations into more manageable workflows. Back in the design stages, the floorspace might have seemed generous to the planners, occupying much of Mosbri Crescent frontage and extending deep into the hillside. But within those tin walls were myriad tiny cramped rooms for specialist activities. 

Pictured ~ NBN's Film Department where motion 16mm film was cleaned, spliced, repaired, and inspected before airing. The large reels were movies that extended over several reels. The photo illustrated NBN's 1965 booklet: "Your Guide to NBN Channel 3"

The Film Department handled the station's core media: motion and stills film. The department comprised separate areas for storage, slides production, graphic library, projection room, stills studio, film editing, printing and animation, copying and finishing, and film processing that was in essence a small chemical plant.

Engineering, that would after installation completed employ no engineers, ran Master Control, maintenance, outside broadcast, and maintained telecine, presentation, and videotape. 

Studios A and B were not simply big spaces with cameras. They required vision and audio control rooms, announcer booths, client viewing, makeup, dress rooms, showers, and so on.

A large ground floor and first floor space housed the air-conditioning plant and electrical switch rooms, while the prop bay, lighting, and commercial crews consumed considerable space. 

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Pictured: Bill Morgan at top right. At left, Geoff Greaves, reporter and later Chief of Staff. The photo illustrated NBN's 1965 booklet: "Your Guide to NBN Channel 3"

Where was the newsroom? On the ground floor near film processing, that handled mostly news film. News had a fairly large room, but never large enough, for reporters, editors, and cinecamera. A very, very crowded and busy space that rapidly outgrew its allocation.

Finally, the first floor (there were only two in the original studio complex) was its own 'rabbit warren' of cubicles and offices for sales, promotions, art, administration, accounting, traffic, producers and directors, and data processing. 

 A Word About "Traffic"

Computer automation of programme playout is the major focus of this article, and here we describe its very beginnings. 

needs work -- see  "traf.com's 101"

Central to playout is The Traffic Department, which produces a "station log" - a sequence of items to broadcast, their duration, and time to air. It must be meticulous in these details. The traffic system takes entries from sales, news, promotions, and programming staff. It books commercial time slots and reports them to accounting staff for billing. The commercials fill the spaces between news and entertainment. 

The Traffic Department is the least glamorous but most important in the station. 

When it was entirely paper-based and compiled by the exclusive labour of people with typewriters from spiked pieces of paper to create the station log (aka telecast log, or programme schedule) it must have been a nightmare for television due to the number and variety of events, in cross-checking, correction, and duplication. 

It was elegantly described here, presumably by Ken McKay, one of the site admins at WATV:

...[the Traffic department] handled the dual tasks of turning the Program Department’s TV guide and the commercial bookings placed with the Sales Department, into a coherent schedule of events for the operational and presentation staff to execute.

In the early days, the department was simply known as Continuity and everything was documented in a ledger, before being typed, duplicated and circulated to the videotape, telecine, master control, audio control, announce booth and duty presentation supervisor, for presenting as the day’s TV programs. 

   ~ WA TV History 

We shall see below how NBN's traffic department began, apparently with an almost immediate introduction of an accounting machine, and progressed to incredibly complex network operations, almost entirely automated.

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1950s

Newcastle songwriter, Bob Hudson, in his parodic album "Newcastle Song," joked about a fictitious but entirely believable local business "United Urinals" whose founder began his business with "nothing but a sheet of galvanised iron and his imagination."

The punchline puts us in mind of investors who, having got their broadcast licence, now had to build a TV station. How, in fact, did NBN begin with nothing but a vacant block of land at Mosbri Crescent and... well, they had considerably more than just imagination. Many senior members of the founding team were experienced in radio broadcasting with its quite similar operational template, having been seconded from 2KO and Sydney's 2UE. The owners themselves already ran a radio broadcasting empire.

Television had been operating for nearly 20 years elsewhere in the world when Australia's first station began broadcasting in 1956. The delay was quite understandable, considering only 10 million people shared a sparsely populated island continent of nearly 8 million square kilometres. Every item of infrastructure was on a scale ten times that of any European country.

The delay to implementation was not a pressing political issue. There were no large manufacturing corporations to bully the government to accept their version of a television system, like the absurd beginning of broadcast radio thirty years earlier. Or as had been going on particularly in the United States, where bedlam reigned as lawsuits flew between inventors with mutual theft accusations. The only influencers of any note were Australia's print media barons who were fortunately preoccupied with mutual pissing contests, unconcerned by what technical system might be chosen by Canberra's consultant boffins.  

The delay was to our advantage, for Australia chose (arguably, but easily so) the highest quality and most compatible television standard: PAL-D. Rushing it might have resulted in the easy and cheap path of choosing the US's NTSC that was prone to, shall we say, deficiencies. 

Which is all said to ponder the irony that NBN then chose the US's Radio Corporation of America (RCA) due to convenience, speed, and cost. RCA had to modify their system to PAL specifications and, as oft said in these histories, had to scour their organisation for engineers familiar with the "old monochrome gear." Getting inventory of any obsolete stock out the door no doubt must have delighted them.

1960s

NBN Channel 3 began in 1962 transmitting from a single site, Greater Mount Sugarloaf, to serve a single market, the Lower Hunter region: Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Port Stephens, Maitland, Cessnock, and the "Coal Fields."

Pictured: One of NBN's twin 6KW RCA TT-6AL VHF transmitters at right. Monitoring and control console at centre. Dual RCA microwave link receivers at upper far left.

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It was mostly a "turn-key" installation.  A Radio Corporation of America (RCA) team arrived from the US to fulfill most of the basic needs to go to air. In the station's technical inventory reports, no manufacturer models are mentioned in those early years. Fortunately, however, the photographic record provides identification. 

RCA supplied two, 6-kilowatt, TT-6AL VHF transmitters configured as main and standby. They powered an RCA VHF antenna 470 metres above sea level. The antenna array converted the 6KW into an effective 100 kilowatts of radiated power (ERP). Dual TVM-1 studio-transmitter links (STL) fed the studio's programme vision and sound to the Sugarloaf transmitters. These links were not just main and standby, but were 'diversity switched' according to which receiver had the strongest signal from the studio. Two Mt Sugarloaf to studio downlinks were added at some time before 1977: an RCA TVM-6 and an "FL4" - the latter of unknown manufacture. Two portables links were supplied with 1.2 metre dishes for field work, assumed to be TVM series.

Studios

Three studio cameras were bought from RCA. Initially, according to former GM George Brown (and he would know) the cameras were TK-12, later modified by George and Rod Prout (future chief engineer) into TK-60s. Bill Childs, from the first camera team, provides detail that would be otherwise long lost: 

The common Taylor & Hobson standard set used in Studio A were: 2”, 5”, 7” & 12.”  We had a 1” for wide variety work but had to remove long lens hoods. We occasionally used 14” & 16,” as well as the T&H Zoom. They were extremely good lenses. I regularly dollied on a 5” when in trouble, or if the director got into trouble.

Just in case we have faded from history, the names of the original 1962 trainee cameramen (stagehands/lighting assistants/boom operators) that I can remember were: Peter Scott, Dave Wilson, Norm Broomhall, Bill Childs, and as chief cameraman, Bill Bowen. My days at NBN were amazing - we were all so keen and willing to learn. It was a great team lead by Ken Stone, Matt Tapp, with us wrangled by Len Richardson, Floor Manager, who went on to be a senior executive with Associated Press in London.

Allan Black, who worked in the station build and commissioning in 1962, mentions that Studio B had a single camera. Revealed in photographs (elsewhere) it was an RCA TK-series.  Studio B was quite small at that time - 25 x 20 feet - but doubled in size by later absorbing the technical maintenance room.

Sometime after the station began operating, a secondhand OB truck was purchased with its two RCA TK-31 cameras that used 3-inch image orthicons. There is mention that the truck came with a videotape recorder, possibly a record-only device. Unconfirmed.

For studio vision switching, a 'special effects" generator was listed  - oddly, as it's not major plant, but at the time was probably synonymous with "vision switcher" used in studio control to select vision sources. The effects generator was likely an RCA TG-25. 

Vision switchers for Studio A or for Presentation are not mentioned, but our photo of Studio A control room (at right) shows what could be an RCA PTS-1 vision switcher being operated by Bill Bowen. Audio was through an RCA BC-6 (or similar) console. 

Studio B was still quite small, as was its control room, which might have been only for audio at first, according to photos, while the single camera was remotely controlled from Master Control.

Telecine and Videotape

Film handling was the heart of the operation from day one, for this was 1962 when most sources of material were motion film, transparency slide, or live studio output. 

Early videotape media and plant was prohibitively expensive, with the further complication that in some cases recordings would not necessarily replay on a different machine, even of the same manufacture and model. 

NBN initially bought two telecine chains, a slide scanner, and a film processor for developing newsreel and commercial shoots. The motion film-handling machines were simple mechanical projectors that emitted into the lens of a television camera designed for them, which is how optical film became electronic TV signals.  

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Pictured at right, a rare (if not the only surviving) photo of NBN's original 1960s "film chain" room. Reproduced courtesy of Allan Black, from chapter 32 of his reminisce at Australian Old Time Radio.

Early machinery discussed here were termed "film chains" or "film islands." Usage of the term "telecine" increased dramatically when these combinations were replaced with single unit "flying-spot" machines, discussed in the 1970s section.

The two projectors at left used an optical multiplexer to enable the use of a single camera. The multiplexer was a mechanical device that use a mirror to switch the camera to either projector. Lacking documentation, it is assumed here that the pickup camera was an RCA TK-21 vidicon camera and that the multiplexer was an RCA TP-15, amongst the most commonly used at the time. The projectors pictured are indistinguishable from TK-15 projectors in RCA brochures.

A third projector can be seen at right with its own camera. The slide scanner ("opaque scanner, 2 by 2 inch") was an RCA TP-7. It held 35mm slides on a rotating drum that projected into, we can only assume, a TK-21. The slide projector and camera are out of sight in the room pictured above, as they are behind the photographer.

In Presentation we can identify an RCA RT-7 cartridge tape machine to the left of the speaker at far right. The vision switcher under the operator's left hand has not been identified. Presentation switched both vision and sound, possibly in this era still separately - under the right hand is very likely the audio panel with its VU meter. The panel appears to be made in-house.

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At right, through the room's window, can be seen the TP-7 slide projector's drum and a camera to its left. The image shows NBN's original Presentation room. The photo illustrated NBN's 1965 booklet: "Your Guide to NBN Channel 3"

A side note on the telecine room. It included a caption scanner constructed by George Brown that displayed a clock and art department's carboard graphics, the same card graphics used to create 35mm slides. The scanner used a surviving vidicon camera and (memory suggests) might also have included a multiplexor arrangement, with two lit compartments - but that might be imagined. It lasted into the 1980s as a secondary source of promotional material, programme captions, and station IDs for Presentation's use on-air.

The videotape recorder (VTR) that came with the station build was an RCA model TRT-1B, with a second added shortly after. Together they forced the creation of a VTR room and eventually, as machines were added, an entire department with specialist technicians. Photos and some working details in The Monochrome Years illustrate the growth as the company experimented with various brands and models.

 There is little evidence of any other RCA VTRs other than a TR-4 and, partially visible in a 1964 photograph, a one inch machine beside the TR-4. NBN was eventually to become an "Ampex" outfit, despite RCA's dominance in the field at first. It would be interesting to know the thinking, and/or experience, that led to the the changeover. Both RCA and Ampex were US companies who specialised in NTSC 525-line television equipment. NBN planning for colour would choose the simplest (or cheapest?) path to simplify their PAL 625-line rollout. 

Traffic

For our final roundup of the first decade, we turn attention to the Traffic Department, an operational team that will increasingly figure as this article progresses.   

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Pictured:  The top machine is an IBM 082 punched-card sorter, identified by its 'art deco' styling. The operator in foreground (the lower machine) is working an IBM 421 accounting machine (tabulator). Somewhere out of sight a punch-card operator is entering data on new cards.  The photo illustrated NBN's 1965 booklet: "Your Guide to NBN Channel 3"

The IBM 421 was released in the early 1950s and ceased manufacture 1966. NBN's system was in operation by at the latest 1964, barely two years after the station went to air. 

Each commercial contract, sponsor name, and television program code was punched into a physical card, sorted, and the 421 tabulator would sequence these cards to  print the station log on multi-part fan-fold paper, and decollated into copies for on-air departments.

Punch cards had the same information for both accounts and station log. 

The original IBM 80 column punch card system used an IBM 421 accounting machine. It was entirely electro-mechanical. When the new IBM system was installed the old system was dumped into the harbour. To move out the old IBM system, they had to remove the outer wall of the computer room. A revenue report from that system took 4 hours so it was only done once a week.

   ~ Ron Thompson, NBN's former Office Manager

Printing the station programme log, however, might have been a much more direct operation for the machine, effectively translating the card information into human-readable printout. Card handling and printing was extremely fast on this machine.

No official noise level figures were published for the 421, but the consensus is they approached 90dBA (absolute). This explains why Ron says the wall needed disassembly to remove the beast. It would have been instantly discovered upon its first operation that a room should be built to enclose it. Pity the operators. Industrial deafness was a possibility.

TVW7 in Perth used an IBM 447 accounting machine. Again, in Ken McKay's precise language:

TVW's program and advertising information was entered onto IBM punch cards, and then manually sorted into a deck of cards representing every on-air event taking place in a given day. The cards would then be taken to a sound proof room where [an accounting machine with a] very large and noisy line printer would create the daily schedule as a multi-copy printout, involving the original top copy and a number of carbon copies.

These then had to be separated (de-collated) and stapled for delivery to the various operations personnel. The Accounts Department gained an advantage, as the same punch cards could then be fed into the printer again, with a new task determined by the configuration of wires on a small patch panel. This process then totalled advertising revenue... It was very labour intensive, for something intended to streamline the clerical workload.

Which also explains the now famous de-collator that appears in NBN's photographs, always seen lurking (perhaps sulking) in the background.

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Sales is a most important aspect of this discussion due to its close relationship with Traffic, in that its sale of air time was input directly into Traffic and thereby into, of course, the telecast schedule.

At this point in its ongoing invention of how to run a TV station, several mightily important realisations were troubling management. On one side of the coin, selling TV commercial time to clients demanded timely information that was still hard to come by in a paper-based world, an information pipeline that would be solved when personal computers arrived on sales desks. They were to wait several decades even for shared access to a 'green screen' terminal in the mid-1980s, when a fourth-generation Traffic computer system would be installed. 

A question to raise here is how the sales team interacted with the Traffic Department, and the time they spent getting commercial spots into the system and then confirming them, when all data entry was done via punch cards.  

On the other side (of that coin) conventional computerised business systems were a bad fit for the broadcast business, and far too labour-intensive despite 'state of the art' machinery, due to (if nothing else) the huge and ever-changing inventory of commercials that came - then went - almost every day.

 Colour TV

Things were about to change. In February of 1969 the federal government announced that Australia would adopt the PAL-D colour system, and so the race was on. The industry assumed that possibly the gazetted 3-year notice had been activated and set its schedule for 1972. In the event, it was to be 1st March, 1975. Well before the 1975 colour switch-on, NBN was effectively broadcasting in colour, but with the colour subcarrier notched out. 

For the full story, see Preparing for Colour.   

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1970s

Introduction 

Despite the cost of converting to colour, NBN prospered in this decade. Colour television excited the public, which naturally excited advertisers, and so they spent. Colour, therefore, paid handsomely for its initial cost. And the cost was considerable. Fortunately it did not extend to transmitters, due to the nature of the additional colour information that was within the bandwidth of the transmitted signal. 

Studios

For Studio A, NBN purchased three EMI 2005 colour cameras, two with 2 x Angenieux 15:1 zoom lenses and the thirds with 10:1 lens. A Richmond Hill 2004 vision switcher replaced the old RCA. 

The RCA audio console was replaced with a Philips, and though as yet unidentified, it could only be the console Russell Phemister is trialling, pictured at right.

Studio B, had doubled in size by taking over technical maintenance, the technicians moving into the former Master Control which in turn moved to a new fully-equipped colour control room. 

Studio B's audio booth was enlarged to accommodate vision control, in which a new Richmond Hill Model 2004 vision switcher and chroma key desk was installed. The RCA BC-6 remained in service. The studio's two EMI 200 colour cameras bore Angenieux 10:1 manual zooms. 

Telecine and Videotape

Telecine expenditure was equally dramatic. Three Rank Cintel Mk II "flying spot" machines replaced the RCA chains. A Rank Cintel slide scanner of the same generation replaced the TK-7.

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The flying spot machines were a modern marvel, arriving at the end of the era of film. In TV at the time, the picture on a TV set was created by a fast-moving spot that zig-zagged down the screen to create 25 rectangular-shaped pictures each second. The flying spot telecines use a spot similarly created as the light source to project the film into three "photo-multiplier" tubes, one for each colour. The pictures, relative to projecting film into a camera - even a modern colour tube - were far superior and almost perfect reproductions. And the film ran at continuous speed past the gate, unlike the projectors that used a "claw and stop" film motion, which was rather a mechanical kludge for the eye, when you think about it.

Possibly as a stop-gap or transition device, a colour "camera tube" model (of unknown manufacture) with traditional stop-start film handling was retired circa 1980. An early character generator lived in a telecine rack, regularly demanding its distorting characters be tweaked back to normality. Nearby a Magna-Tech rack, with what was surely a "(multi)-channel 16/35mm magnetic film dubber & @ telecine follower." 

Some guesswork is in play here for the videotape room. The listing for the 1970s confirmed in photographs includes two Ampex ACR-25 2-inch tape cassette machines, two Ampex VR-2000B 2-inch reel VTRs, one Ampex AVR-1, one Ampex AVR-2... and almost certainly more, including an early Ampex 1-inch machine. 

Described to me as "George's pet project," the commercial production side of videotape operated for well over a decade, a small empire unto itself. The original installation of an into two areas, a VTR room with three AVR-3 machines, a VPR-2BS, controlled directly from the second room that housed Ampex's EDM-1 computer-based editing, an audio mixer described in B&T's entry as a Neve, an Ampex 4-track tape, and client viewing. It also acquired an Ampex HS-100 video disk, beloved of football producers, it was a pain for techs due its innumerable head crashes. Two booths in this section contained editing suites for Sony U-Matic and VHS.

Outside Broadcast (OB) acquired two EMI 2005 cameras with 15:1 Angeneiux zoom lenses. Two EMI ML-71 microwave links, its existing RCA TVM-6a portable link, and a second van, a Bedford CF with two Ikegami HL-33 colour cameras with 10:1 lenses, a Sony 8-channel audio mixer, and an Ampex AVR-2 VTR. 

News moved effortlessly to colour 16mm film, until portable "camcorders" were available at broadcast quality in the Sony Betacam format. Therefore, film facilities expanded accordingly for colour transmission, with a Film Lab series colour processor, Eclair NPR 16mm camera, Nagra sound recorder, Arriflex BL single system, Steinbeck six-plate editor, and "comprehensive colour photographic facilities" - this latter pitched at commercial clients. 

"Computerisation"

It's the early 1970s and personal PCs are still being invented. The Apple II is years away while the IBM XT PC is a decade off. Terminals comprising a small green-screen display (the size of a portable TV) with a keyboard are about to arrive, bringing access to mini-computers and mainframes - but not NBN's just yet.

*** MC with terminal in pic

On the ground floor of NBN there is a lone terminal in the new colour Master Control room that talks to Mount Sugarloaf and reports on transmitter parameters, with some remote control functions. An electro-mechanical remote mechanism is the only other connection to the RCA transmitters,  but was now redundant. Across the corridor in VTR production the aforementioned EDM-1 is controlling those three Ampex VTRs via its computer control system. Not quite a computer, more of a programmable automation system, but near enough. And that's it.

Upstairs however, the world of computing is about to get serious. 

A young Ron Thompson started work at NBN to begin his thirty year stint massaging the Traffic system. He arrived in time to see the venerable old 421 tabulator wheeled out and an IBM System 3 Model 10 wheeled in.

This was the first of the computers at NBN. Installed in 1976, it took 12 months to program for the traffic system by myself and another employee, Brian. It was the IBM System 3 Model 10, and was ;programmed for Traffic, Accounts, and the Shareholder System via 96-column punch cards using a programming system language called RPG II (Report Program Generator). NBN did not program for Jayes or The Star. That came at a later date.

   ~ Ron Thompson

The model 10 used an optional peripheral, a modified IBM Selectric typewriter that both entered commands or printed short reports or messages. Cards for the Model 10 were punched and sorted by an add-on module. Considering the extremely large media library and the number of events in a television 24-hour log, it's no surprise that it took a year to prepare the Model 10 cards. The 421's cards, being 80 column, were not transferrable.  

Due perhaps to @ deficiencies in the Model 10 - unable to process while cards were being written, requiring a reboot to stop a process... or was it just those punched cards! - shortly afterwards the model 10 was replaced with a model 8 and the system was now free of punch-cards. 

Pictured below: Two operators in foreground are entering data via 3741 data stations that write to dual 8-inch floppy-disk drives. In the photo of the single operator is a hard disk pack (labelled 'NBN-3). 

Traffic

At this point we can no longer avoid delving into the details of the "traffic department." 

The process of that department, overall, is to combine commercial spots and programme content to a broadcast schedule. As described succinctly at traf.com's "Traffic 101" ~

Traffic is the scheduling of program material, which consists of commercials (paid, contra, and make-goods), public service announcements (PSAs), promotional (typically of the station), and sponsorships. The station sells airtime to its customers directly, and indirectly through agencies and network affiliations.*  Sales aims to sell the available airtime ("avails") at the best possible rates. The station (broadcast/telecast) log defines when content will be aired. The log (schedule) is used by the on-air operator who switched content sources. A copy of the log after the fact ("as aired") is used for reconciliation to determine. Traffic system reports are used by Accounts to bill customers and to generate revenue reports for management. (* NBN affiliated with WIN and NINE to sell national commercials).

Sales staff sell commercial time and enter bookings into the system. Before a computerised process existed, they effectively just wrote chits and handed them in. The system's output to Sales was little more than what slots were empty, called "avails." Ratings research was up to the staff. Although ratings-measurement companies sold this vital information to TV stations, it was typically national research, not local numbers. That was determined by the response to an advertisement by the business.  

Programming staff compiled the list of content (entertainment) with commercial breaks. Its output was the template for Traffic. They had to know what was rating well enough to be worth it's price. That could only be determined by measuring viewers.

Traffic staff compiled the 24-hour list of commercials sold and slotted them into the day's programme list. Then typed it out. The list included unsold space, filled with promotional material, public service announcements, and station IDs (identification) - all inserted between programmes. The output for Traffic was the station's programme log.

Accounts staff analysed the sold commercial time and generated invoices to bill the advertisers. Accounts also, of course, created revenue reports for management. Those were the outputs for Accounts.

From this you might notice that Sales had the fun job, Traffic had the hard job, and Accounts had the boring job.

In simple terms, to in any way automate this process required the invention of the accounting machine. NBN's IBM 421 machine described earlier removed much of Traffic's and Accounting's grind by its handling of punch cards that were physical tokens it could sort, analyse, create reports, then print their data into (almost) coherent reports. Preparing the cards required a mountain of painstaking work, but the machine then expedited the sorting and reporting. Mistakes tended to be unforgivable, but inevitable.

The move from IBM's 421 accounting machine (tabulator) to a IBM's System 3 Model 10 gave the extremely rigid process flexibility by replacing an electro-mechanical sequence with a modifiable memory. Next, moving from System 10 to System 8 removed punched cards from the equation, replacing them with a re-writable 8-inch floppy disk. Errors at the input stage could be quickly and easily corrected. 

The IBM programme (written in-house) matched ad spots with clients and slotted them into commercial breaks, following regulator rules and client 'conflict' guidelines. High-speed printers wrote the finished log that went to on-air departments. Reconciliation was the final programme to create an "as aired" log for legal and billing.

Although this is essentially a sales, billing and accounting system common to almost every business on the planet, where it differs is the "traffic" bit that is unique to the broadcast industry. And as we shall eventually see, Traffic's output was a 24-hour paper report that would (that must) eventually become an electrical sequence to control playout automation. For broadcasting, that would be an advance of the same magnitude as the invention of the mechanical tabulator.