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We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service

paleotronic.com

11–20 of 27 posts

Re: We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service

#11
Ceefax has a long legacy: even today BBC News online stories are written so that the core of the story is told in the first four paragraphs, because that is what was sent to Ceefax.

(It's not just nostalgia, though the concision is good practice. It's because that format is still used by the BBC's "Red Button" TV information services.)

Re: We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service

#12

Had no idea there was a forerunner for printing, Beeb Fax from before fax machies too! :) Philips did produce some Ceefax TV's with printers though. https://obsoletetellyemuseum.blogspot.com/2011/12/philips-26... (Scroll a couple of pages as they have the world's biggest page header!)

I know a guy who, even today, use Teletext for all kind of things (mostly sport results). I remember ORF (Austrian TV), they had samples of QBasic source code. Teletext was really a nice thing to have in Europe.

My dad used it here in the UK right up until the service was ended. I used to gently make fun of him at the time, but I now see that he knew it was the most efficient way for him to get the information that he wanted. He was optimising for time and simplicity, not sophistication.

Re: We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service

#13
post #6

Teletext have more than a million users in Denmark. Truly surprising to me but it is also kinda awesome. It certainly still serves a purpose. No ads, no noise just pure signal.

German Teletext is filled with ads. FIND WOMEN IN YOUR AREA is what I consider ads.

Re: We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service

#14
My first programming gig as an intern back in the mid 90s was converting the output of a teletext decoder box into a web site by rendering GIFs and using image maps to make the numbers appearing on the page clickable for navigation. Gave me respect for the standard - so much information encoded in so few bytes!

Re: We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service

#15
For a while in the 80s the BBC Ceefax service offered the ability to download software [1]. You needed special hardware to decode the broadcast signal, and software to convert from text-encoded binary. It seemed pretty amazing at the time.

At about the same time, the BBC also broadcast audio-encoded software on its Radio 4 station after normal programming had finished for the night. I remember staying up late to record it onto C60 cassette tapes to load into a BBC Micro at school (and possibly my own Vic 20, my memories are a little hazy).

And now radio is broadcast on the internet.

[1] http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/telesoftware/

Re: We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service

#16
post #8

Teletekst is still active in the Netherlands, and they also offer a web interface and Android/iOS app to expose the info on your mobile devices. It is still beloved as all info is short and easy to consume while on the go. Fits perfectly into a Twitter loving society ;-)

I wrote a small command line program to read NOS Teletekst:

https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt

It supports colour but not the special teletext drawing characters as they seem to have no Unicode equivalents.

Re: We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service

#18
post #8

Teletekst is still active in the Netherlands, and they also offer a web interface and Android/iOS app to expose the info on your mobile devices. It is still beloved as all info is short and easy to consume while on the go. Fits perfectly into a Twitter loving society ;-)

In the UK it was transmitted on analogue TV during the vertical blanking interval - and digital basically killed it off. How is it transmitted in the Netherlands?

Re: We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service

#20

Ceefax has a long legacy: even today BBC News online stories are written so that the core of the story is told in the first four paragraphs, because that is what was sent to Ceefax. (It's not just nostalgia, though the concision is good practice. It's because that format is still used by the BBC's "Red Button" TV information services.)

That's a based on standard newspaper practice; it's a lot older than Ceefax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
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