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Ceefax Turns 30
VirtualUK writes "Ceefax, the text information service from the BBC turns 30 today (just 3 days after myself)!! For those not lucky enough to have seen what Ceefax is about, it is text information pages sent in out-of-band data space of TV transmissions in Great Britain. What started off as a subtitling project evolved into a service still used by over 20 million viewers a week even in the face of the Internet revolution. It just goes to show that for a lot of people, the best source of sport results, last minute holiday bargains and horoscopes is still just a click away on their TV remote."
One of the reasons Ceefax/Oracle was so popular was that it gave "just the facts, ma'am". It had to display on a 40x23 (ish) screen to work on the TV's of the time, and most pages used ZX81-style graphics (huge "pixels"
Curiously, this reduced content actually worked in its' favour - about all that could be put on a single page was the raw information, without political or other bias; there just wasn't the space for opinion. Even when they used linked pages (page displays, waits 30 secs, new page displays, repeat and loop) the real-estate was severely limited since each page had to stand alone.
I clearly remember preferring the minimalist information from Ceefax over the long-form in a newspaper. If I wanted more about a story, I could listen to the news or buy a paper, but to get an overview it was ideal. A good example of 'less is more'. It helps that the Beeb has good journalists who can succinctly tell a story, of course...
Simon (on-topic, for once
Physicists get Hadrons!
I think it's called teletext in some countries. Didn't RTFA though :)
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
That's pretty cool! Here in the U.S., we had to pay per minute for contemporary services on Compuserve. With prices as high as $0.20 per minute, it's no wonder that Compuserve was primarily reserved for businesses! But to have hundreds of pages of text information pushed to your television set at no (excluding television tax) cost? That's amazing!
:-)
Of course, the proliferation of U.S. BBSes started in the mid to late 80's and gained momentum right up until the Internet became popular in the mid-90's. Which makes me wonder. Is there a telnet machine somewhere where we can access the CeeFax info? It would be interesting to see what they're pushing over the airwaves.
Ah memories. Sometimes I wonder if the tech of the 80's wasn't cooler than the tech we have today. Sure, we have Gooey interfaces and full color graphics, but what's that compared to the thrill of interfacing systems over a modem, cursing at natural language interfaces, designing BBS screens in TheDraw, and wowing at the amount of info that's (unknown to the general populace) being pushed over massive research networks and dial-up nodes? (3 days for an email? That's speedy, man!) Or maybe I'm just nostalgic.
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not only wants to be free but aparently broadcasted in as many forms as possible
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
And yes, I'm in an NTL area that can't get it. And yes, I'm terribly annoyed - I used to use the subtitling quite often, even though I'm not deaf. Just wanted the volume off to listen to music, for instance, or needed to be quiet for some other reason.
NTL, please sort out the broadcasting of teletext as you claimed you weere going to do more than three years ago.
Cheers,
Ian
This is a good example of how the BBC is on the forefront of journalistic technology compared to the majority of US news services. One can only hope that one day soon, the FoxNEWs of the US journalism "scene" will wake up and smell the coffee of pure information display in an easy and nonobtrusively readable manner.
Ceefax [...] turns 30 today (just 3 days after myself) [...]
And 12 after myself. So what ?
...and its days are numbered. The UK government's deadling for ceasing analogue transmissions is 2012, at which point we'll all have to use the richer digital content. The reason it's been so successful for so long is similar to fax's longevity: it just works, and everyone is familiar with it.
Wow, I thought that they had discontinued that a while ago. That is interesting that, that many people still use it.
"...I thought we were an autonomus autocracy!" --Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail (for those who dont know!)
feh, lots of things are pointless, this one too
....Mostly because here in the USA we have flat-rate unlimited local calling for telephone service, which resulted in people going online through modems using telephone lines. That's why online services proliferated, and the rise of the public Internet happened in the USA due to this factor and the arrival of V.34 (28.8 to 33.6Kbps download speeds) and V.90 (56 Kbps download speed) modems in the 1990's.
One "cool" thing about the teletext system was the little known fact that the page numbers are actually in HEX.
The "public" pages only use hex numbers that consist only of numeric characters, but I once had a TV that allowed you to enter the hex numbers aswell, and you could find all sorts of cool stuff, including some kind of system to automatically set video-recorders etc.
Just had to think of my father-in-law, who recently got a laptop, DSL flatrate... and an USB tv tuner so he could watch his stocks and the football scores in four windows.
I was just speechless! To go at such length and spend so much, just to replace the TV!
Its not that slow. Some new TV's cache the pages so you can have a whole story at the touch of a button.
And is the new digital text better? Well it has better graphics but there is actually far less information there and its far far slower!
The data presented by the Ceefax decoder in UK televisions appears to be closely related to the BBC Micro. In fact, if you directly compare an early BBC Micro display to teletext, you'd be pushed to spot a difference
Most decoders fitted to UK TV's were actually simple TTL devices which just presented a 31 character set of glyphs to the screen.
Indeed, in the early 80's, the BBC transmitted programs for the BBC Micro via teletext in a 'Telesoftware' service. This finally ended around 1989.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
ceephax acid krew
It runs all the time on one of my desktops - IMHO it is the very best source of concise, up-to-date information.
Here are some dumps of the current BBC front pages, courtesy of alevtd and w3m (some stuff snipped to avoid slashdot "junk" lameness filter).
Its called Teletekst here in the Netherlands and is still used quite a lot. The public broadcasting corporation even has a web gateway. Check it out here for those of you unfamiliar with the concept of teletekst:
http://teletekst.nos.nl/
So you basically see all the area in black on your TV screen... use your remote to search for the pages.
I guess they have this service on the web because a lot of people, like another poster said, like the sparse/terse way of information presentation. I frequently visit the weather (page 702) and news page (page 101) for a quick overview. Very useful.
Also used for TV program listings and stuff like that (page 201 usually).
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
anyone remember the computer game page on channel 4 teletext called digitiser? That was some weird stuff..
l
http://www.lynn3686.freeserve.co.uk/digitiser.htm
http://www.mrbiffo.com/biffodigitiser.htm
'The Man' and his column and all that 'press reveal' only to uncover a weird swan or something with flashing red eyes.
I always wondered who was paying the wages of those crazy guys
Being only 20 myself, I've grown up with Ceefax. (for those of you moaning "it's called teletext isnt it?"-- BBC were the first to come up with it and called it Ceefax, other people who then followed the idea called it teletext)
It's therefore always been at hand and is still very useful till this day. I hadn't really ever thought of TV's without it.
I wonder if the younger generations will one day take the internet for granted and not realise what a great technological advance it really was!
"Je suis sac du poubelle dans la jardin"-- RDC
I still use Ceefax a lot, especially as a news source and for sports scores.
It is also a source of grief to me that modern TV's don't cache the pages as they receive them so you always get the page you want instantly.
Up to 799 pages (BCD with 3 bits for the top number) (yes 088 is the real page that is 888) at 1K each, thats less than 1MB uncompressed!
I also remember that BBC used to distribute software over teletext which yu could pick up with your BBC Micro teletext decoder.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
If you recall the first article, this is 30 years old!
Furthermore, we do have interactive TV on the Digital broadcasts - e.g. Sky Digital, NTL (cable), Telewest (cable) and FreeView (a free terrestrial digital broadcast that has all of the BBC channels etc).
The number of times I've watched my Dad flick from the digital broadcast of a channel to the analogue one just to use teletext/ceefax is remarkable. The digital is much more flashy with its multiscreen/in-screen news feeds etc but he just prefers the simpler analogue ceefax/teletext.
Many people prefer the simple but fun quizes on ceefax etc than playing a graphical game over digital - especially since there is often a cost fo those games.
A triumph of a simple system that does its job well over a more complex one it seems...
...it is text information pages sent in out-of-band data space of TV transmissions...
/. course, I guess.
No, it is not 'out of band'. The data is sent using parts of the signal that are not part of the picture. If you know what the vertical blanking interval is, you know what I mean. If you don't, go learn something.
The submitter is no engineer. Par for the
The latest Slashdot meme.
Digital TV services do have better interactive functionality, although naturally Terrestrial, Cable and Satellite services all use different methods though. BBC, Teletext Ltd., and BSkyB all offer some form of general digital text service (rather than specialised interactive stuff like multi-angle sport, news multiscreens etc.), and a few other channels have more channel specific information services, like UKTV.
I think all digital TV in the UK can theoretically carry old style subtitles as well (teletext is sent separate from the MPEG stream, and reinserted afterwards), although Digital Terrestrial doesn't usually carry it, and most channel don't offer services anyway (even the BBC, using teletext on digital just gives you a message saying you should use the BBCi Digital[1] Text service instead).
[1] All teletext is digital, but the old style teletext is usually called analogue teletext to differentiate it from the versions on digital platforms.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
As a football (soccer) fan ceefax is the fastest way to keep up to date. I don't know any football fan who hasn't at some time "watched" a match on ceefax.
The 30 years of ceefax pages (p190 from memory) have quotes from several players and top managers (as well as David Moyes) saying pretty much the same.
Interviews with players in the past have quotes where ceefax is often the first time they here about something happening at the club they play for.
By comparison the digital services like "Sky Text" etc are slow and clunky. They don't allow the flexibility to show/hide information quickly and in my opinion are a huge step backwards for usability.
In other words - It sucks! There's no 'direct access' to information.
Ceefax is great for the footy scores - if you know the page number, you just type it in, and voila - you're on the current scores for the Premiership or whatever. Took about 10 seconds.
Kind of like the latest version of Windows really - it's much newer, but it takes 10 times as long to do anything as it did 10 years ago on your 486 :-)
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
Well Ceefax used to be very important for me.
:-(
I'm really sad about it
Joe
---
My ceefax web : Carrefourtechno.com
Cee Fax run.
Run Fax run.
Come on someone had to say it.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
VRT, the Flemish broadcasting corporation also has a teletext service, and has had for as long as I can remember. What's cool about it is that they also have a web interface to view it via their website. In the graphical view ('Grafisch'), the pages look very much like they do on TV (but on TV they are full screen of course).
The three-digit numbers are links to other pages; in the web interface you can click on them, but on a TV-set you enter them using the remote control. The four colored links at the bottom are shortcuts that can be used by pressing the correspondingly colored button on the remote.
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Ahhh... good old MODE 7, aka Teletext. :-)
:)
One of the things I really miss about TV since moving to the USA is the various Teletext services. I've never understood why this system didn't catch on outside of Europe (maybe there's a technical reason, I dunno).
Long before I had internet, I could spend literally hours reading Teletext pages and playing the really basic, but still entertaining games (remember Bamboozle?). We even had a Teletext reader on the old BBC Micros at my school, about 10 years before they got the JANET linkup
The closest the US has is the information pages that DirecTV and some cable providers have. However, they're nowhere near as comprehensive.
20 million people would be about 40% of the TV-viewing population -- and that sounds quite plausible, it really is still very widely used, and virtually every TV set is capable of receiving it.
It's great for TV listings too... Long before anyone had satellite or digital cable, one could quickly load up a list of programming for the week, with info pages for all the major shows.
You don't wanna look ont tinternet for an oliday, you wanna look at ceefax.
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Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
About 60 million; probably about 55 million. Taking into account that Ceefax provides i) TV listings; and ii) subtitles it wouldn't surprise me that 1/3 of people who use a TV use it at least once a week.
I'd say that's pretty reasonable. The thing is it's just THERE. Instantly. If you wan't to see whats on TV next, just hit the text button and you've got it. Subtitles, blam, they're there!
:(
It's so simple and effective to use. I was hugely dissapointed when the text packed up on my TV recently.
Back in 1974 us Brits could buy a TV with
effectively what was a built in wireless colour video terminal (something every geek should appreciate). Yet only in the last few years have big noises been made about wireless terminals in other arenas such as POS. Just goes to show that sometimes theres no such thing as a new idea!
and why not ? a lot of information is on there..
missed the news, want to know the headlines, sports, weather forcast, or even what's on tv tonight or the whole week with movie reviews of what's showing..
I use it often, not daily but almost. Usually to check the weather forcast or to see what's on tv.
I read some time ago that teletext usually is used much more when there's some sports event, like soccer championships or olympic games, as people then watch their tv and want to up-to-date information about scores.
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
606 on BBC1/2 and 120 on ITV/Ch4/5 brings up a "now and next" display for the 5 main channels. Very useful and much better than the similar offering on my FreeView box.
I only wish that they had standardised on a particular number as they did with subtitling (888). I am forever typing the wrong one in for the currently selected channel.
Are there any Teletext to HTTP gateways? It would seem a natural way to widen the exposure of the information.
www.eFax.com are spammers
What do you guys pay for basic cable? How many watchable channels do you get? When you consider that cable or satellite over here is just wall-to-wall shitey unfunny comedies (you know, obnoxious teenager says "wiener", cue 2 minutes of laugh track and then a 20-minute ad break) and costs more than £10 per month.
It's more likely than you think. I use Ceefax pretty much any time I use the TV, mainly to show the 'Now & Next' page, which shows the current and upcoming programmes on all the terrestrial channels.
I've spent many a happy hour browsing Ceefax, and this website about how it all fits together. As a youth it takes a lot of effort to work out how Ceefax sends the page you ask for, but there's no two-way communication -- Page Frame Relay comes to the rescue.
Bit of trivia -- Ceefax is ocasionally known as in the UK as the Skinternet because of the relative cheapness of getting on to Ceefax as opposed to the internet.
[ Skint + Internet ]
Hint: amongst other things, Teletext lets people check the national lottery results after they get back from the pub on Saturday night :).
According to the latest census figures, the official UK population is just under 60 million.
It's not hard to imagine that at least 90% of the population watching TV on a regular basis. Now, bear in mind that here in the UK, we're all familiar with Ceefax/Teletext as a quick and easy way of getting at useful information, such as...
Personally, I can easily believe that 20 million figure. Especially as I contribute to it! :-)
Is the font (glyph shapes) used for teletext also standardized at a 1974 level? They are horribly ugly, and difficult to read for some people. One would think that nicer looking teletext fonts would be a differentiator for tv manufacturers (well, if tv sets can have 0, 2, 10, 100 or several thousand page caches 2004, they can have blocky, halfblocky or smooth fonts as well).
for example, when my gf came from Brazil, she was amazed by this technology. We mainly used it for the tv-guide, subtitles and the weather forecast. I always assumed that everyone had teletext, but us Europeans are lucky it seems :)
The last time I was in Warsaw there was something like an info button on the remote. I pressed it and I could 'change channels' to different pages of text. One page was a character graphics map of Poland with the weather forecast! I kid you not, there were characters on the map indicating clouds and rain too. It was like a flashback to the good old days of ANSI animation on the local BBS.
Was this service the same a Ceefax?
I guess, based on what I see around me here in Holland, about 90% of the television viewer will use Teletext/Ceefax. If only to see wich program is next, look up the weather forecast or sports results (during commercials) or simply to turn on subtitles when someone else if on the phone... The biggest power is that is just a button away when your watching TV anyway. It's a easier to use then the web but provides up to date information.
Back in around '85, we had Continental cablevision. There was an "AP News Plus" service, which had cheesy computer screens of news, that rotated every 30 minutes.
I remember every few months the graphics would be completely messed up without anybody noticing, for a few days. Was funny to watch all the vector graphics mess up.
I remember in Minneapolis there was a "children's stories" cable channel. All it consisted of were computer screens with cheesy(think MS Word clipart) graphics to children's stories. Nobody ever seems to remember these "off" cable channels available in the 80s.
Also on that same Minneapolis cable provider(dont know which one), there was one channel that apparently was just a Commodore 64 reading out numbers. This was not to be confused with the 'local community channels' that used Amigas and such to read out school lunch menus.
if I had more info on this, I'd make a web page about it. Wish we had Teletext in the USA.
Just under 60 million.
How many watch television on a weekly basis
Well around 98% of households have a TV set. So you could expect a large number of them.
I find it hard to believe that any reasonably fraction of that group is actually using Ceefax on so regular a basis.
Why? It is often faster than broadband in that you don't have to move from your seat in order to find things out. I use it most days as it has up to date TV listings. It is easy to get weather reports latest news etc and remember that it has been around for 30 years so it is much more familiar than the Internet for a large number of people.
Tell your Dad, if he's using Telewest, he doesn't have to flick. Ceefax is part of the broadcast.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
In france you could get a Minitel device, like teletext but much more interactive
Minitel.
The layout and style of Ceefax was largely based around the text capabilities of the old Acorn BBC Micro (the name is, as far as I know, a coincidence) that was originally used to design and layout the pages. It had 32K of memory, as I remember, and was a marvellous machine.
I'm a big cricket fan (this is relevant, honest, stick with it).I lived for a while in a basement flat so the radio didn't work. Rupert Murdoch's Sky had all the cricket for a bit and I refuse to give him money on the grounds that he is evil in a way that would Make even Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer blush. So I have occasionally been reduced to watching the test match on Ceefax. Not entirely satisfactory it has to be said.
RTE have their version Aertel on the web.
http://www.rte.ie/aertel/
Looks fairly similar to Ceefax and other teletext services.
Teletext is one of the reasons why internet usage is not as high in the UK or Ireland as it is in USA/Canada. News headlines and sports results or updates are very easy to get on teletext and would be one of the main things that I would use the web for.
Go to CNN International's homepage, scroll to the bottom and click CNNtext for a good look at what Teletext is like.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
After moving to the US, Ceefax, as well as better access to more exciting sports, plus better beer...What I don't miss, the East End accents, high tax rate and the weather :).
bamboozle!
:(
That thing rocks, what page was it again, I know it was on 4, but I cant find it now.
instead we have BBCi which is much much better
Slicker, yes; prettier, yes; but better? OK, maybe as we're on cable, which seems to be the poor relation in the UK interactive TV market, we're not getting as full an offering as people on satellite or terrestrial digital, but we find the BBC digital replacement for Ceefax to be rubbish in comparison to teletext - and teletext doesn't work on digital cable.
It's slow (admittedly, Ceefax isn't exactly fast, especially if you don't have a Fastext telly, but digital is supposed to be better), it's much more difficult to use, as you have to negotiate menu after menu and page after page to get anywhere, whereas with Ceefax, you could just enter the page number you want. Most annoyingly though we don't get anything like as much content as with Ceefax - just news and sport really.
Even then it doesn't always work properly. During the Olympics, BBCi had a theoretically great service where you could switch the live Olympic coverage to a different even than the "default" going out on the actual TV channel. Unfortunately, more often than not we found it simply wouldn't finish loading and we were stuck with no sound and four mini pictures, none of which we could select.
I lived in the UK for a few years. I saw Ceefax used less than half a dozen times, always by me or my then-girlfriend (another American) checking it out for novelty's sake. I never saw my British housemates use it, or friends while I visited them, etc. I guess I just had a non-average experience.
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ANother one
How many people are there in the UK?
About 60 million.
How many watch television on a weekly basis
I remember reading somewhere that it's about 90-95%
I find it hard to believe that any reasonably fraction of that group is actually using Ceefax on so regular a basis.
I don't. It's just one of these ubiquitious services that people just take for granted. You get news, sport, weather, etc. a the touch of a button. Instantly. Free.
For instance, the programme you're watching finishes and it'll be 60 sexconds before the next programme starts. Instead of watching some trailer for the next "exciting" episode of EastEnders, you can press the text button and get the news headlines, or check the weather or see how your team got on. When the theme music for the next programme starts, you press the text button again, and you're watching TV again.
It's so quick and easy it's become second nature to most people.
I dunno about everybody else, but I still prefer teletext services if I want to look up football results, quick scan of the headlines or find out what tomorrow's weather will be like.
I have FreeView (terrestrial Digital TV) and I barely use the 'interactive' services available there. Despite 30 years of development it still seems relatively slow and cumbersome compared to being able to dial in page 102 and jump straight to the national news headlines, etc
About the only advantage it has is Picture-in-Picture.
You've obviously never used Ceefax - in the UK it's something which for the last 20-odd years has probably been used by anyone who has ever used a television. Pressing Text while watching TV (BBC) would simply bring up Ceefax and it's something which I'd actually say most TV viewers use on a daily basis.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
The name isn't a coincidence - the computer was originally going to be called the Proton, but the BBC were looking for a computer for their BBC Computer Literacy Project - see here for more details.
(And in fact, teletext came first - the BBC Micro came out in the early 80s, teletext in the 70s...)
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
Here in holland (netherlands if you wish) we can check out some stations on the internet. Do other countries have a similar service?
I'm curious how Ceefax compares to Minitel (France) -- I recall hearing from several sources that Minitel was a spiritual ancestor to the Internet, where a lot of information was available in the home starting in the mid-70s.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
That's because Teletext has the remarkably fast method of finding the page you want - you just remember the number and type it in. I will never ever forget that motorsport can be found on page 360, even though I haven't used it in years.
The new fangled interactive service is fine, but it's all arranged in a hierarchy menu. Instead of dialling 360, you press 'down' a few times to get to 'Sport,' hit a button. Then 'up' on the next menu and select 'next page'. Then 'down' a couple of times to get to motorsport.
It really feels like it takes longer, even though the load time of any one page is quicker.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that Ceefax at one time was used to distribute computer software, as a kind of poor-man's Internet/BBS (download only). The primary use was to freely distribute software associated with the educational programs on the BBC to schools around the country.
A Teletext adapter was available for the BBC micro computer (Acorn) that would allow software to be downloaded from the Ceefax service. The concept was called Telesoftware, although the inherent limitations of teletext meant that it never really caught on.
RTE (Ireland) have their Teletext service online
At one stage they even had a software download service for the BBC micro:t ware/index.shtml - 03/telesoftware.htm o ftware.html
http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/telesof
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/themicrouser/issues/05
http://www.pembers.freeserve.co.uk/Teletext/Teles
Who needs Tucows or Sourceforge when there's Ceefax?!
British Teletext has always been pretty good in terms of subtitling even live
... am I watching".
broadcasts. Always on page 888 whichever provider.
It would be nice if there was some conformity with TV guide pages, now and next
is quite useful usually for answering the question " what the
I always thought that the subtitles should be extended to cover non English speakers maybe digital services might do so at some point.
As an educational tool subtitles are very useful it is often easier to understand a broadcast in a non native language when it is written down.
Do any of the satellite broadcasters provide subtitles on a standard channel?
and or in more than one language.
With the number of film releases available on dvd with multilingual subtitles I am surprised that the digital services do not appear to make available the other
language content or do they use specially created mpeg streams?
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When I moved to the US six years ago the lack of "text" on the TVs was most upsetting. It is funny how much one misses "the poor man's internet" once it is unavailable.
I remember sometimes waking very early in the morning before school. The morning news and cartoons weren't on yet, the sun was just coming up, only the sound of birds tweeting outside, and I'd switch the TV on to find a Ceefax page displayed with some quiet background music playing. I'd watch it for a minute or two, then grab a big bowl of Cornflakes and put the kettle on. It was always a nice way to start the day.
I digress. The technology was teletext with which the BBC provided CeeFax. ITV provided Oracle. Channel 4 provided C4 teletext.
Acorn added Teletext mode 7 to the BBC Microcomputer. It was great because it used just 1k of screen memory, thus many text adventures used it. With the addition of a teletext adapter such as those sold by Morley or Watford Electronics, you could take teletext transmissions and run them straight into your Beeb. The adapter also allowed for software to be downloaded from teletext pages, which given code size back in the day, was quite viable.
For oodles of information on teletext take a look at http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/links.shtml.
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I think Teletext was done in the US for a short period several years ago. There was a national news service called Elektra that carried news content updated by the staff of WKRC TV in Cincinnati OH. There were TV's and set top boxes capable of receiving the service, I think made by RCA. I seem to remember seeing some of this stuff demo'ed at a World's Fair and Exposition, so it must have been in 1982 or 1984, because those are the only two I've ever attended. But, I was fairly young then, so my memory may be incorrect.
Extremely non average.
Unfortunately, different television sets implemented "fasttext" in different ways, and also sometimes offered other features to "cheat" in this way. One easy one I remember was on my first fasttext set where it had buttons to increment and decrement the teletext search number. It'd wrap when it rolled from 9 to A, but if it was already on A it would happily increment B, C, D etc until it reached F and rolled back to 0.
Another cool one was a TV set I had that would let you press another coloured button while the first one you pressed was still searching. If you were lucky with the transmission timings, you could press all of the buttons in turn and see which one was different to the other three which would be the right answer. Finally, last year I lived with a friend who had an old TV which was fancy for its time. It had cool features like teletext caching, bookmarks and all sorts. It would actually let you switch the fasttext display from the given names to the page numbers, making the cheating trivial. It would also let you enter full hex numbers into the bookmarks system by using increment/decrement as on the first TV I mentioned, but you couldn't enter them directly.
Of course, cheating at a teletext game wasn't really the point, it was just interesting to play around with the teletext system and Bamboozle (a game which I believe is still broadcast today on Channel 4 Teletext) was one of the few things which used un-enterable numbers.
Also interesting is that in the early days they had to limit the number of available pages so that the interval between a particular page being transmitted wasn't too high. I believe the transmission speed was increased at some point which allowed for more pages to be introduced. Also, since there's no rule that the pages must be transmitted in order, pages which must change often or oft-requested pages can be transmitted more frequently. The subtitles on "Page 888" are transmitted more frequently than other pages so that they can be updated in realtime as dialogue proceeds in the programme. I've often thought it'd be fun (although not particularly useful) to recreate something like the teletext system using multicast on the Internet.
Perhaps they were too polite to watch TV when you'd taken the trouble to visit them?
The format used by Teletext (Ceefax etc.) was also used by early online services such as Prestel and Micronet 800 - essentially BBC Micro MODE 7.
:-)
:-)
I had Prestel/Micronet 800 as a young teenager (somehow I managed to convince my mother it'd be a good idea, god knows how) in 1986. They had a national network which had dialup POPs all over the British Isles. Prestel + Micronet cost around GBP 20 per quarter - or in real terms, a little less than broadband Internet costs these days (although there were telephone charges to add to that too). I had a Spectrum with a VTX-5000 modem which had a passable emulation of the BBC's MODE 7.
Micronet even had a MUD called Shades (WHICH IS STILL GOING! - see http://games.world.co.uk/) which was ultimately my downfall when the GBP 200.00 telephone bill arrived. My father promptly banned me from going online. So what I did was get up at 6 am when the household was sleeping, and go on for half an hour a morning instead - that level of usage was lost amongst the normal phone bill, and since the local telephone exchange was still an electromechanical Strowger monster, there was no option for itemised billing
The modem was 1200/75 baud. Going through a Strowger exchange, line noise was common. However, it was good enough I could buy and download games for my Spectrum, as well as having email and a Micronet 'Gallery' (sort of like a web page, but teletext format) a decade before most people
Ironically, the TV my computer was connected to was an old valve (tube) colour set which was totally incapable of displaying Ceefax.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Didn't some manufacturers sells VCRs with built-in teletext tuners?
If I remember correctly, this was used on some machines as a rather nifty way to set the VCR timer to record a specific show. You would goto the teletext tv listings and just cursor down to the program you want to record. This was obviously a long time before any PVR appeared!
I used to have a teletext box for my BBC Model B (BBC Micro computer), this could be used to download celefax an oracle (itv's teletext service). But it's the ceefax software download area which was my first introduction to free software/open source, although I don't think every sent over ceefax was open source.
I remember downloading my C compiler over ceefax, I think it was micro-C or mini-C. But a C compiler that would compile on a 64KB system. Knocked my socks off it did.
There were also 'high res' (for the time) satelite weather imagines you could download via ceefax. Save them up for a few days and have your own animated weather charts.
All in all, teletext services provided far more of a positive affect on my life than the TV signal it was piggy backed on.
M0571y H@rml355.
Some TVs substitute their own font these days, but the original one is quite recognisable.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I'm not sure if this was a joint Belgian/Dutch project or not, but in the early 90ties we had Interactive Teletext here in Belgium.
You could send email, lookup numbers in the Yellow Pages or send a Fax.
It was called INFOGATE. It was a bit of a mix between Teletext/Ceefax and Minitel.
This is how it worked:
- call a toll-free number and get a pagenumber
- Turn on your TV, switch to the INFOGATE-channel and go to to the teletext page you got over the phone
- Leave your remote alone
- Now use the phone-keypad as your keyboard!
- So cool! I actually sent some email and some faxes through this system. And it worked.
You could of course watch what other people were doing if you could find their "page". But you could not participate in their session.
They cancelled it because it was too expensive and unpopular. It was unpopular because it was pretty complicated for the computer illeterate.
There's a nice article about this in the Guardian, here.
I kid you not, I sometimes use it to get the information. Though I'm on the net, the familiar simple interface and trustworthy information make it more compeling than going through "normal" web pages.
Example - to get a weather bulliten I have a link in my bookmarks directly to the page 793 on TSR (Swiss French TV), with direct, no BS information, whereas look at the same info on their site: TSR Meteo. The info is the same, the source is the same, but to get the temperature for Geneva on next Monday I have to go through some flash menues...
When I was a lad I saw a BBC Model B computer, which had a Ceefax decoder attached to it.
This allowed you to browse ceefax on the computer, and also (this is cool) download software from Ceefax.
The BBC put out a few "BASIC programmes" for the BBC computer in this way.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
http://www.rte.ie/aertel/
for the irish rte teletext to internet gateway, for those of us who know all the important numbers off by heart... (180 is whats on now on all stations, probably the most popular!)
Especially the share price information, 15min delayed but also TV schedules, news, cinema timetables etc there was a lot of free information available on the various channels. I wrote some Unix/linux software for the OPT III external teletext decoder. It got fried during a storm and the company has gone out of business, these days it's easier to get the info from the Internet over DSL though there are still a number of teletext decoders out there.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I believe Mr Biffo wrote a column called Biffovision in Edge, a UK industry Gaming magazine, up until recently.
I call it an industry Gaming magazine because it contains more than just reviews, etc. It actually interviews developers and rates development tools. Oh, and it has a job section at the back!
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
My favourite use is to check football scores and horse races.
I hate sigs.
As a Deaf boy growing up isolated in the countryside in the 70s/80s, TV subtitles provided by the Ceefax service was my only gateway to learning about the wider world.
e atre.co.uk
>Ceefax was developed by BBC broadcast
>engineers who were working on ways of
>providing subtitles for the deaf.
Many thanks.
Curiously, in 1999, I worked for the BBC as a web interface programmer, and I was based at Kingswood Warren, which is their R&D dept. Looking back, I guess that's where they developed Ceefax.
Wierd place, with its own vegetable gardens and croquet pitches.
I nearly lost my job there due to reading Slashdot too much... (I was rubbish anyway) - Guess Ceefax was where I got the habit of staring at pages, waiting for them to update...
Just as well I changed careers to becoming a playwriter now... see my sig
+tomato+
--
See the new play by Deafinitely Theatre!
'Children of a Greater God' by Tomato Lichy
Jacksons Lane Theatre, London, Nov 3-13, 2004
£10 / £7
Box Office 020 8341 4421
mail@jacksonslane.org.uk
www.deafinitelyth
I would like some cache too... at today's memory prices, it would hardly have any effect on the price.
I guess it just doesn't have enough marketing value.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
Don't know if this is of interest but the new television at least panasonic ones now load all the pages of teletext in when you go to a page say its a 3 page article it loads the fist and then you can just flip through them using the channel changer button or volume buttons on the remote
I prefer Ceephax.
Am I the only one who remembers Telidon? I'm old, I know.
I was talking to my grandmother sunday, they are getting a new TV and she mentioned that she made sure that it will have ceefax as she missed its absence on the tv that just died!
This required you to dial up a (typically premium rate) phone number and then access a specific teletext page. This was your page, and you could interact with it using the digits on the telephone keypad. I played many simple games, e.g. snake, and there were even ways to do online banking using this.
If you knew how to, other people could also look at the same teletext page and see exactly what you were doing. Sky used to have a password system for some of their online games, so it used to be quite easy to figure out someone else's password by looking at it as it was typed in!
Marc
(who won a tenner by being one of the highest scores in one of the games)
If you live in Northern Ireland you can get BBC1, BBC 2, ITV, Ch4, then the southern channels RTE1, RTE2, TV3, and TG4. Because you're in the north, you don't have to pay the license fee for the semi-state broadcaster RTE, but you do have to pay the license fee for the BBC. I also believe that people on the west coast of Wales can pick up the RTE signal.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I thought the software distribution part was for doing remote updates to outlying "branches" when Italian phones were either too slow or too noisy to do overnight software distrubution. Also I seem to remember that some of the BBC Tv shows that launched the BBC micro allowed you to downloads the "source" for some of their demos/games. Or am I bonkers?
Got me all excited there, 3D Teletext would be cool!
(or maybe not)
All of it in swedish.a sp
http://www.tv4.se/visa/?innehall=/texttv/text-tv.
http://www.svt.se/texttv/index.html
In vino vici
There can't be a more efficient way to get the most important news items than through a TV with a large page memory :)
In vino vici
personally i wake up everyday and check the weather on ceefax i have done this for about 15 yrs since i was in school and still do it now it also has all the up to date tv listings and such to be honest all this suprised me to how proud i am of the service. Happy birthday Ceefax!!!
I Predict A Riot
It was Q-Link or Quantum Link, run by Quantum Computer Services. Later they added PCLink and AppleLink because they were hurting for cash. PCLink and AppleLink were basically the same as Q-Link and email could even be sent between the systems. Even later than that, they combined the PCLink and AppleLink services to form a now well known system: America Online.
Yep, if you didn't know it already, Quantum Link is the direct predecesor to AOL. AOL discontinued the QLink service on November 1st, 1994.
The death blow to QLink, delivered by none other than Steve Case:
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think a large part of what makes Ceefax/Teletext so successful and why I still love it even with digital interactive stuff, internet etc is that it's just so nice to use.
It's consistent - okay, sometimes consistently blocky with consistantly slow waits for the carousel, but it's just darn consistent dammit! Same "fonts", same styles, Page 100 is always the start, it always has the same features (hold/reveal/mix etc) from one TV to the next etc.
The information you're most likely to want is shown immediately on page 100.
For novice users there are helpful indexes and usually coloured hotkeys that take you to well chosen related pages.
For more advanced users you can enter a page number directly and get to the information you want quicker.
It's highly accessible - huge, clear text on a plain black background that practically anyone can read even if they're hard of sight etc.
With such a low resolution you only get the information you want and can easily assimilate at one time instead of a huge screenful of ads and other garbage to wade through.
It's fairly quick (as long as you aren't after page 101 when the carousel has just gone past 102)
It's remarkably easy to use. My granny uses it.
Now, is it me or did the BBC do their theory research wonderfully (as they always seem to do, who says the license is a waste of money when so many slashdot articles originate from them) and have followed HCI principles really rather nicely. This is what happens when you develop a system properly - 30 years later, people are still using it and still love it!
For us the best thing about this system is that you do not need to turn the computer on: eg you can get a quick weather forcast in only 30 seconds !!
:-(
Also I notice that to celebrate 30 years they have dropped some of their *website* content: I had a script to pull and analysis the films-on-TV pages and the content disappeared a couple of weeks ago
(I am trying to get XMLTV working now)