61–70 of 106 posts
Is/was this something specific to Europe and UK? I'm in the U.S., born in '66, and I've never heard of this before.
This 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.
For 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.
Continental Europe still runs teletext-over-DVB so probably "just works".
Is/was this something specific to Europe and UK? I'm in the U.S., born in '66, and I've never heard of this before.
Yes, it wasn't a thing in the US, but basically all televisions in Europe had a text mode for this, and it was very popular when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.
For a brief period in the 1980s a few companies tried to provide teletext service, either over modem or a UHF decoder to a home computer or - more bizarrely - as a read-only presentation done overnight when no other scheduled programming was being shown.
Keyfax in Chicago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgs0kbxo68w
Keycom home service: https://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/history/Keycom.htm
For 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.
Count Binface
This 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.
Am I misremembering or could you play games on Teletext? I feel like I remember playing very primitive and janky videogames on the TV as a child in the 90s, but I might be making that up. My clearest memory of Teletext is how slooooow and unreliable it was to load anything. But I sat it out and waited. Compare that to now where if your website takes an extra second to load then you can lose like half your traffic. Ev…
You would dial a premium rate number and you would then be read out a page number. You went to that page and used your telephone keypad to do interactive stuff and the page would update in near real time. The two biggest things were managing your Sky fantasy football team and banking from the Co-operative bank.
Our TV had a function to let you see all active page numbers so I would often go and spy on what other people were doing.
Is/was this something specific to Europe and UK? I'm in the U.S., born in '66, and I've never heard of this before.
In the 1990s, most TV sets could receive it, but I don’t think many people actually used it.
I forgot about that ”scrolling algorithm” that the teletext has. It instantly feels familiar but I wonder how its actually implement. You input a page number and it seems to pick the right spot on the hundreds place, and then seems to arbitrarily drop into a loop for the right page number. Doesnt seem to have any logic, as if a spinner with the numbers 01-99 is constantly whirring in the background
The page data is transmitted every blanking interval. The most frequently-accessed pages are transmitted most frequently, and the infrequently-accessed pages are transmitted least frequently (so you have to wait longer for them to come up).