Michael Rodd, Raymond Baxter, Howard Stableford, Maggie Philbin, Carol Voerderman: the list of Tomorrow's World presenters goes on and on. It's filled our TV screen's, first on Thursday nights and now on Fridays for as long as we can remember, and now it's on the Web. The Tomorrow's World pages are part of the BBC's Web service (a net.radio-times?). On them you can find information about past and previous programmes (though currently only for the series that started at the beginning of October). There's also a brief history of the program - all 1107 editions. Worth a quick visit.
Remember the queues in the summer of '77? Remember thrilling to the exploits of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo? Remember the battles over the Death Star, the Ice Planet of Hoth and the Forest Moon of Endor? Did it all really start nearly 20 years ago? With Star Wars games like Tie Fighter and X-Wing filling our machines hard discs and George Lucas rumored to be working on the first three films of the saga the Web's Star Wars pages are the place to be.
The music industry has found the Internet. The independent label Go! Discs has just put up a set of pages on the Web, offering information on their artists as well as sound samples from new singles and albums. Once the home of Billy Bragg and The Housemartins, Go! now have a roster of artists that includes Paul Weller, The Beautiful South, and Portishead. Take a look at the Beautiful South section, and listen to a snippet of their latest single. Be careful, though, it's over 800K long - around 5 minutes of download time, even with a fast modem! One for the fans of this label's artists.
The Magellan space probe plummeted to a fiery doom in the atmosphere of Venus on October the 12th, ending its 5 year mission. This real star trek isn't over yet, there's years of work to be done in analysing the gigabytes of data sent back from Venus. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Magellan Web pages are full of information and images of Venus - including spectacular radar images of the surface of our cloud shrouded sister planet. Is Venus' planetary greenhouse to be our fate? Surf over to this URL and find out. One for the hotlist of the aspiring net.space-cadet.
Train Spotters of the Web, Unite!
You may have thought the net was safe, full of cool people who wear mirror shades and surf the rad bleeding edge of technology. Unfortunately, you're wrong. We're really all anoraks, clutching our virtual pads of paper and collecting the numbers of the IP packets that pass in and out of our machines. And just to prove it, take a hop across to the riveting European Railway Server. Here you'll find the details of thousands of train classes from all over Europe, full of those fascinating facts about operating voltages and train sizes that you always wanted to learn. Carriage fans also have their place here, with full colour images of trains and carriages from all over the world. There's even a place for fantasy railways. Puff on through this URL.