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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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
...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.
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.
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.
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
All of that is true, however it's largely unrelated - the rise of the public internet happened largely in the last decade, not 30 years ago.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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 ]
Stop nit picking.
You must be new here.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Tell me do you always link completely separate things in bizarre twists of the Logic? or are you just stupid?
Ceefax 1974, BBS mid to late 80's, Internet 90's. One did not affect the adoption of the other. Internet actually replaced BBS, and until the mid 90's 98% of the population wouldn't be able to tell you what the Internet was never mind what the hell BBS was.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
Only a Brit could go to Benidorm and like it...:)
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
Hang on, someone calling himself my king is ordering me to be quiet.
But you're fooling yourself. We're actually living in a dictatorship.
Source
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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.
My parent's first teletext capable TV had a lovely bold font that was really readable.
The next TV had the skinny 'spectrum' style font that most screenshots you see use.
You have to remember that in the UK, PAL has around 284 vertical lines of resolution, so a 40x25 screen only had around 10 pixels per character vertically to define stuff in. I think most TV sets use a standard ROM with the 256 8x10 pixel fonts stored within.
One advantage to having teletext hardware in the TV however was that the TV itself could use them for its on-screen display functionality, e.g., to set up brightness, contrast, etc. That probably saved a chip or two inside the set.
In comparison, the modern digital text services suck. They look nicer with the smoother fonts and stuff, but they are too clunky. It must be a failure of the digital receivers which are either only decoding the video part of the MPEG2 stream, OR the data part of the stream. So when you enter 'interactive' mode, you have to wait for the box to download the world and everything. Each time.
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)
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!