We still use teletext in the Netherlands. I check it every morning for the latest news.
It’s also still available on Spain.
Ceefax Simulator
41–50 of 106 posts
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#42Ok dialing in 360 for the first time in over 25 years and receiving modern F1 results was an absolute surprise. This is an incredible recreation.
Would be cool if this data coule be injected in the signal to a TV. Bring back Ceefax! :-D In some countries it still exists though, which is pretty wild.
That's exactly what he did - if you look at this history section, he was broadcasting analogue TV signals to his house, and embedding his own Ceefax service in the signal!
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#43Does the UK still have a live teletext or was it shut down ?
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#44I have a 6yo daughter and it’s always funny trying to explain old technology to her.
Yesterday I was trying to just explain TV shows starting at specific times the of the day and even that seemed insane to her. Equally having to go to a shop to get a song was mind blowing.
I haven’t had to explain ceefax yet so this will help.
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#45This is great. Teletext was a big deal in the UK, a lot of people used to book cheap holidays from deals they saw on it. It was where you could check the news, the weather and maybe play a multiple choice quiz or two. Happy memories.
It was the best way of checking the score in a football match, in real time. When there were enough games playing to necessitate pagination, the wait for your team's page to come around added extra tension! Also, Bamboozle.
Bamboozle was great, it had "hidden" pages with numbers like "4F5" -- normal ceefax numbers were 0-9 because that's what you could enter on your remote control, the hex numbers were only reachable from the "fasttext" red/green/yellow/blue buttons, so it was hard to "cheat", the wrong answer sent you back to the beginning, you couldn't just put the number back
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#46Does the UK still have a live teletext or was it shut down ?
It was shut down with analog TV, the DTT version was MHEG based "red button", which the BBC itself is shutting down (has shut down) as
1) It was never as good as ceefax
2) It was never as good as the internet, even when it launched in 2010
No idea about ITV, I barely know about BBC given how rare it is to watch live TV.
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#47Germany's public broadcaster still offers an official website to see their current teletext: https://www.ard-text.de/
Here's the Austrian:
https://teletext.orf.at/
And it might be tempting to brush this off as just an anachronism to amuse ourselves with, but IMO this undervalues it quite a bit.
For example, the Austrian teletext still has almost a million daily users (in a country of 9 million) - let that sink in.
And there's a good reason: Conceptually, Teletext (at least when it's well maintained) is the antithesis to modern information media. There's neither room nor want for clickbait headlines, padded videos, tracking libraries, SEO and so on. You get a curated condensation of current affairs in a tiny package - a few hundred pages, each 40x25 7-Bit characters. The SNR is orders of magnitude above anything else out there.
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#48For those living in London, one of the Mayoral Candidates is promising to bring back ceefax. Not sure how he'll do it, technically I believe DTT can carry teletext data, although I'm not sure if modern TVs will process it.
Back in the day I believe ceefax used to be generated out of a couple of beige tower PCs in a BBC office somewhere.
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#49Germany's public broadcaster still offers an official website to see their current teletext: https://www.ard-text.de/
Same thing with Rai, Italy's main broadcaster: https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#50This is great. Teletext was a big deal in the UK, a lot of people used to book cheap holidays from deals they saw on it. It was where you could check the news, the weather and maybe play a multiple choice quiz or two. Happy memories.
That got me in Tenerife!