Weird flashback to reading on Ceefax in 1988 that Feynman had died.
Ceefax Simulator
91–100 of 106 posts
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#92This 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.
We once got flights to Florida from Glasgow for £49 fly drive off of Teletext. Booked it Tuesday and flew out on Thursday. Those where the days!
I think everyone in the UK in the 80s and 90s were taking those crazy trips to NYC and Orlando from Teletext. You'd check every day to see how insane the prices had got. I remember people going to just fill suitcases with things like Levi's jeans which were massively over-priced in Europe.
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#93This 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.
I used to check the live world snooker championship scores on teletext in the 80s (when the BBC didn’t show it all live)
Now skipping between it on iPlayer and hacker news in my phone…
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#94If you like Ceefax you might also like Ceephax Acid Crew[1], discussed on HN previously [2], who uses a lot of vintage electronic music gear and puts actual(?) simulated(?) Ceefax screens in some of his videos. He's the brother of Squarepusher if that means anything to you. - [1] http://www.ceephax.co.uk/ - [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30998462
[deleted]
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#95Germany's public broadcaster still offers an official website to see their current teletext: https://www.ard-text.de/
Switzerland too, in 3 languages -- although the amount of content drastically reduced over the years: https://www.teletext.ch/
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hbbtv only embed the URL into the stream. The rest of the JS part came from internet still.
Maybe it first worked like that, but it's certainly no longer the case in newer versions. I've personally compromised a not-network-connected TV using only broadcast signals. HTML+JS can be pushed via the "DSM-CC object carousel"
Funnily enough my memory of trying to implement the DSM-CC specs is that they are broadly equivalent to a denial-of-service attack on your brain
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
My coworker 4y old son have never seen money exchanged at shops since UPI has become so prevalent in India. He would just pick things at shop and walk. He didn't relate scanning QR codes with exchange. I should ask my coworker if he tried explaining physical money to him and how he reacted to the idea.
The money thing is really interesting in that my kids don’t have any concept of how much any amount of money is. And if I say I don’t have money for something they just don’t get it because all I ever do is beep my watch on the reader.
That's interesting, it was about a decade ago now, but at a previous employer we actually went into classrooms to help them teach about money, as part of the social mandate of the corporation (they're a Credit Reference Agency, so, the bad stuff that's going to happen when you're bad at money as an adult is partly their responsibility, they reasoned that they should ensure kids are better prepared, and part of that is sending employees into classrooms to help with this material)
All the kids we saw were capable, I'd even say surprisingly capable, of understanding the basics of stuff like budgeting. I remember we ran a scenario where they're helping a man to shop for himself and his wife, they're pensioners so they have a very inflexible income and an overspend is going to be a huge problem, and the kids were pretty careful, they understood that just because Mrs Smith likes flowers, if we haven't enough money for flowers after buying the intended groceries we shouldn't buy the flowers, they grasped that the choice isn't going to be "Buy both and it'll work out somehow", and that if you don't buy enough food you'll be hungry and so on. Even if all they were doing was telling us what they thought we expected, that's enough, as adults they won't be executed for going bankrupt, it's just important that's a conscious choice.
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#98Can we simulate the Acid Crew, though?
(this was made on an Amiga Video Toaster!)
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#99This 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…
Once digital TV was a thing in the 2000's there were definitely games via the Red Button on Freeview.
Re: Ceefax Simulator
#100In 1990 I had a VCR that when you asked it to program a scheduled recording would go to the relevant TV listings page on ceefax/Oracle/4-tel and let you select the program from the listing using up and down arrows. Then, when the schedule started, it would even adjust if there were delays. THAT was my 'the future is now' moment.
VCR+/Video+ was a step backwards from that luxury, having to look up numbers didn't really make things faster. It really felt like devolution until 'guide' systems started appearing.