So, first things first - the animations on these pages aren't really Testcards. They're commonly known as Pres - that's presentation. They're the little bits of telly that go in the 'junctions' between programmes, and provide continuity links whilst the transmission tapes are lined up in 'VT'. We could have called this area Presentation, Continuity, Clocks, Schools presentation, Slides and Idents, but it wasn't as snappy.

Pres comes in several flavours - Clocks (often seen just before the news or at close down), still 'slides', often advertising the next programme or advising of a technical problem, and idents - animated channel logos like the famous BBC twos.

Before the days of computers these graphics were created by filming mechanical models. The 1970s spinning globe with the stretched map behind it was created by spinnning a model globe in front of a concave mirror. The station clocks were mechanical until the early 80s, and the advent of the BBC B microcomputer. The schools diamond was a particularly ingenious model, involving a mirror and a stripey roller...

So, why on earth have we recreated them? Well, these old logos will bring back memories like nothing else. We guarantee you saw them more often than you saw any programme - every time you watched television, there they were.

The recreations were made in Flash by Dave Jeffery, and where possible use historically appropriate music.