Why Ceefax & Oracle Changed How We Live
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- Опубліковано 12 жов 2023
- For some people, teletext was just something that had always been there. But for certain older people like me, who can remember TV before teletext, it was a godsend. Before this the idea of instantly finding out the latest news, weather or sports scores was impossible. Teletext changed all that, in 40 columns and 24 rows of blocky text and gaudy graphics. And it became popular despite the expense of teletext capable TVs. But where did the idea come from, why wasn’t it a thing in the USA, and why is it back - on the Internet?
• Teletext on Channel 4 1998 reconstituted from video tape recordings: www.uniquecodeanddata.co.uk/te...
• Page of all recordings reconstituted, going back to 1979: www.uniquecodeanddata.co.uk/te...
• Another teletext archive: www.teletextarchive.com/
• Teefax service online: zxnet.co.uk/teletext/viewer/
• Nathan Dane’s Ceefax service online: www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk...
• Nathan’s UA-cam channel: / @avrovulcanxh607
• Open University TV programme discussing some of the technical parts of teletext: • BBC/OU Teletext
• Jason Robertson talk about recovering teletext from VHS tapes: • Text, Lines and Videot...
• ZDF (Germany) teletext recreation: teletext.zdf.de/teletext/zdf/
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Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullard...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel
news.google.com/newspapers?ni...
books.google.com/books?id=Dil...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NABTS
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExtraVi...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_Tel...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JTES
www.eldiario.es/politica/tele...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_r...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program...
625.uk.com/pdc/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceefax
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORACLE_...)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletex....
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHEG-5
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Red...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital...
www.alphr.com/life-culture/10...
www.uniquecodeanddata.co.uk/te...
www.techradar.com/news/intern...
www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk...
www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk...
#littlecar - Наука та технологія
Ah, good old Videotext as it was called in Germany. Thanks to it I have one of my best memories in life. It is August 11th, 1999 just after 4 AM CEST - the day of the solar eclipse. I turned on the TV on SWR3 regional program, covering all 4 possible destinations: Saarbrücken, Karlsruhe, Freiburg and Stuttgart. It was supposed to be a bad day for looking upwards but weather forecast on Videotext predicted best chances for Karlsruhe, so I went there. In the end Karlsruhe turned out to be one of only a handful of places in Germany within the umbral shadow to not being overcast. Without Videotext I would probably have travelled to Stuttgart and had seen only a dark cloud ceiling getting even darker.
We are all glad you didn't habe to go to Stuttgart :)
Fascinating stuff. Teletext was like a miracle back in the 80s, it was the internet before the internet
yes and no, in 80s Japan did have some services that were more like a real internet with the both way communication, this was just one way with no input of any kind so it was more like a reading some currated low-mid budget blog
Pity that so many TV channels have terminated Teletext service. Here in the Netherlands the public TV channels still have it, but commercial channels all have closed down Teletext except for subtitling.
Ironic that the country where it was invented closed it down as one of the first public channels....
The 1970s Teletext system, called TV-text, is used in Sweden to this day. I will never forget the first time I used Ceefax.
For those who may be interested, the ITV’s teletext service ORACLE was named thus: Optical Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics !
I actually miss teletext, great video 👏👏👏
Their service for Channel 4 was 4-Tel, as in "Foretell".
@@anonUK oh yeah, I remember 4-Tel 👍
We had our own television station in Swindon from 1973 to 2000 - Swindon Cable. This had its own teletext service included. It also used BBC Micro Mode 7 to display information. It was called ThornTel as it was Thorn EMI who set up the local TV service here.
Around 1999 I interned at Philips Semiconductors in Southampton. One of the managers was heavily involved in the early days of Teletext. He was quite proud/smug that (by happy accident, I think) the UK Teletext character set had included the @ symbol, so it could display these now fangled Internet email addresses. Other European character sets had allocated that valuable slot to various accented characters.
Ahh the old Mullard factory
as a kid visited my aunt and uncles house. they had a new TV. I spent about 2 hours reading teletext. BBC, itv and channel 4 all had their own pages. there was genuinely a great variety of pages. music reviews, movie reviews, news, video games and more. asked for a teletext portable set from argos for Xmas and I was looking forward to it every day for around 6 months. it actually dominated my daily thoughts. while time marches on I do still miss it
My first job was at a newsagent and remember getting up for the early shift when ceefax was on before the scheduled programmes had started.
You'd just stream something now if watching at 5am I expect.
I grew up in the US in the '70s and '80s and this is the first time I have ever heard of this technology.
As you can tell from my video - I liked it a lot! We rented a set in the late 70s or early 80s I believe.
Might be hallucinogen, but seem to remember Radio times publishing barcodes with the Video Plus number, for suitably advanced remotes with a reader. Don't think it lasted long. Video Plus was a Godsend though, in terms of simplicity for programming the video, and then time shifting if programme delayed
I moved to the US from the UK 19 years ago, and agree that no one knows what it is here. I've been asked about it a few times after people have learned about it through videos like this one! Most people seem to agree that it would have been great to have pre-internet.
It really was great for checking telly listing's, football results etc. Though like he said in the video, you always seemed to land on the part of the carousel one after what you were after, like the second division football, then had to wait for it to cycle through the third and fourth divisions, and then the three Scottish divisions, before getting back to the first division results you were after 😃
@@peterbradburn9115 I'd be surprised if the Radio Times offered a barcode for scanning VideoPlus+ codes.
Surely there'd only be 10,000 different combinations even if that was so?
But I'd be surprised if people couldn't remember four numbers for a show - and even if recording multiple programs in one setting, they'd just need to look at the listing in any event to input the next four-digit number associated with the programme printed in the listing??
I wonder how they would've justified this expense for a scannable remote control - to those who don't have significant disposable income!
That takes me back! I remember as a small boy in the mid-1990s lying on my parent's bed with my brother as they filed through Teletex first thing in the morning. We thought we were living in the future back then! 😎
It was super cool. I remember in the late 80's some of our American family came over to the UK to stay with us and they were just blown away by Teletext. They would actually sit for hours playing with our remote and browsing all the pages. Similar i took by brother-in-law to our local Library and i showed him Prestel on the library terminals. Again this was something they did not have so he was fascinated by it and the information that could be gained. Back then i would often go to the Library after school and use Prestel to help with my homework
That's cool. Did you have to pay to use it at all? Did the library foot the bill like with library internet access today?
@@kaitlyn__L The Prestel Terminals in all UK Library's were free. Mine had 3 and they were always busy. So you often had to hang around until a person finished so you could quickly jump on and do what ever you needed to do. I have just remembered the Terminals also had a complete Library index. So you could put in the book you were looking for and it would tell you the exact section and shelf where that book was located. My particular library is huge and spread over 3 floors so this was super handy.
When I discovered it on my uncle's TV set I was like struck by lightning, I stopped caring about my family and started toying with that miraculous thing for all afternoon. Just on the car ride back home started pestering my dad to get a TV with it (had to wait for years, btw).
In Italy it was called Televideo.
People forget that Teletext was still the best way to get news quickly even long after the internet came along.
In the time it would take to boot up an old Windows 95/98/2000 PC, connect via a dial up modem and then open Internet Explorer and load the page would be far slower than switching on a TV and opening Teletext.
Brilliant video, and all those nostalgic clips from the 70's 80's & 90's! Ireland's Teletext service 'AerTel' which launched in 1987 was just retired this week - end of an era...
Talk about blast from the past. I remember being a kid in the UK & whatever we were watching on tv when my Dad came home it'd go straight onto Ceeax or Oracle, we'd hove to go into the dining room with the b&w tv....this was in the late 80's early 90's
Meanwhile, teletext is alive and well here in Denmark, being supported by both our big networks and TV Providers. I just pulled up teletext on our 4K TV on TV being streamed over a fibre internet connection.
Interesting, thanks!
A terrifically researched and illustrated video. Top work, and thank you for all your hard work on your great channel.
2nd. As an 80s child, I appreciate these stories as I was so busy at the time to slow down and enjoy the moment. You are one of my favorite storytellers. 🙏
I didn’t know it was developed in the UK. Text TV as we called it in Sweden was part of every day life growing up in the 90s. TVs were often advertised with how many pages of text they could hold in memory. I guess they didn’t have much else to advertise back then. It was that and NICAM Stereo that separates the higher end from the lower end. It was often on at my grandparents house so I think of my grandpa when I think of Text TV. Getting news through a service lack that actually sounds appealing even now. No ads or videos or too much text. Just a few lines of text of relevant information brought to you by a reliable source. These days the problem is too much information.
Ireland had a teletext service on RTE called Aertel. It began test transmissions around 1986 and began full time broadcasting in around 1987 or 88. Before that, people in Ireland could receive the BBC Ceefax and ITV Oracle services via cable or overspill signals from Wales or Northern Ireland.
another great nostalgia trip from the man who makes nerdy things really interesting.
Teletext was probably the most under promoted service I can remember. it was just that strange text thingy working in the background on the tv. by the time I got into it for cheap flights, weather forecasts and the tv guide, my first IBM-clone home PC was only a couple of years away.
Of big car excites you, technology connections will blow your mind...🤔😂
I remember seeing 'stand-alone' Teletext boxes with wired remote controls at our nearest department stores at around the age of ten. I was delighted when we exchanged our old TV for one incorporating a Teletext receiver and cordless remote. I remember being the only one to become almost obsessed with the new service (my parents seemingly uninterested) and to being really excited (at the age of around twelve) to 'open' each new window on the Ceefax advent calendar every December!
I never forget the weird feeling I got when I tried to see ceefax football scores on an old VHS tv recording. It was like a scrambled time machine.
One thing I was always impressed by with Teletext providers and the people who typed the text that appears on these pages: the Teletext chip that produces the text and graphics is fixed to 40 characters per line only, and a character means a letter, number, punctuation mark or one of those 2x3 graphical elements. Think about this: with these restrictions in place, it was amazing that these people had the large vocabulary needed to find words that would fit, say, individual news headlines into these single lines including the page number!
As a 90s kid in Germany, teletext was my personal internet. It was a window to the whole world. God i miss the times with teletext chats via SMS and things :D
I've not heard of the vertical line interrupt. I was led to believe the data was in the unused lines at the top of the 625 line frame. I understood that in the TV industry in the UK this is what is termed as over scanning. My father used to be a production engineer at PYE's television factory in Lowestoft from 1965 to 1980. It was a term I think he used. Vertical line interrupt isn't as an intuitive explanation as overscan is.
I thought you could see the data if the vertical hold was off and the frame rolled. It looked like a moving mini barcode.
Text-TV as we called it here was introduced in Sweden in 1979 and it's still running. Other channels dropped it in the mid 2010s but the national public broadcaster is still keeping it up. It's also available on their webpage or as a mobile phone app. The latter is being run by a third party though.
Back in the day I was a TV engineer I found a company supplying a decoder board if you had a TV with no Teletxt, at the time I had a 26" Philips TV with no Teletxt and did not want to scrap the TV, the only problem they were not something anyone could fit as you had to mod the TV circuit and fit them inside the TV, they supplied the decoder board and remote control and general circuit information where to mod the TV and where the signal had to be inserted on the TV circuit board however, this was general information and not for TV brand XYZ, you also had to provide all the other componets needed ie the resistors and capicators etc as each make of TV required different extra componants, I have to say the boards were not cheap but worked a treat.
As someone from America, Teletext has always just fascinated me. The closest thing we ever had was the program guide through your cable/satellite provider (which was fully at the mercy of your provider) and never anything that was "standard issue" the way CC was.
I've been around for an awful lot of the future but this is a bit before my time. This must have been mind blowing. It is beautiful.
Even turning on CC (subtitles) was helpful for watching Star Trek TNG. Great for learning English when you are 8 years old.
I remember when I was first year at uni (1997-ish) we got an assignment to describe teletext service as a communication service. Pretty much everyone (myself included) described how it actually works technically to the last detail and never thought once to describe what features it had: index pages, different topics, page carousel etc.
Good thing they graded that assignment on a curve or everyone would have failed. 😁
Today I have teletext app on my phone. Same look, same features. Use it every day. And here in The Netherlands it had the most original name ever. It was called...Teletext.
The saa5050 character set was a miracle of design.
Made to be clearly readable from across the living room, it also leveraged how interlaced CRTs functioned to produce sub-pixel detail (beveled corners)
Gorgeous.
I still remember some of the page numbers.
I watched the Formula 1 growing up and after the Senna had his crash and the race was finished, I was checking teletext services to see if there was any news updates.
I think it was the Geeman station, RTL thatvfirst gave me an update. They had the headline: Senna ist Tot. In English, Senn is dead.
Eventually the news reached Ceefax
Music From Ceefax provided music in the background of many a late night conversation, card game or board game back in the day.
D:E:R colour TV rentals - I remember the ads, the shops and the cars. They were everywhere.
Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s in Italy, Televideo (that's how we call Teletext here, eventho technically that's only the Rai service) was standard on all TV sets and to be completely honest I was never too fond of the way it sort of faked interactivity. But it's safe to say everyone loved it. Even in the early years of the Internet, checking the news on Televideo was enough for a lot of people. I used to read reviews of rock albums on it, while at the same time couldn't find Internet sources in Italian about the subject. And some people uses Televideo to this day, on the Rai site or mobile app or just using a normal TV set. Eventho analog TV signals don't exist in Italy anymore, the old school service is still updated and I still have to see a modern TV that doesn't support it. The alternative service by Mediaset (Mediavideo) on the other hand was shut down last year.
I've never seen anyone discuss it, but my grandfather had a TV with a thermal printer built into the side that allowed him to print teletext pages. Eventually he stopped bothering to refill it and it jsut sat there, but when I was small (in the early 90s) I remember him printing out things fairly often.
Used to love bamboozle and pen pals.. Made some friends from that who I still chat and meet up with today. Ahh simple good fun. I do miss that retro style. Great video 👍
Not forgetting there was a "Teletext adaptor" add-on for the BBC Micro. Making it possible to view Teletext on the computer. It was very fast too, much quicker than the TV version.
Thanks for repeating that bit in the video for those that missed it. 👏
In New Zealand, 1970's and 1980's Colour TVs were especially expensive due to import taxes etc. When "Teletext" first became available, it was only available on the newest and most expensive new colour TVs. It's single biggest use here was probably for the subtitle/captions for TV programmes including the News. As such, for those people who were profoundly deaf or who had a substantial hearing impairment, there was some form of government subsidy available. In NZ, as far as I know, the vast majority of TVs were owned, and renting TVs was far less common than in the UK. From memory, the government subsidy was about 50% the purchase cost of a teletext capable TV, or 50% the cost of Renting one. The uptake of Teletext TVs amongst the Deaf community was high. They turned off even the caption/subtitles about the same time they started switching over to Digital TV. (where caption/subtitles are delivered by another technique).
Great stuff on the VHS data. I remember 20 years ago noticing the data was still on my old tapes and reviewing the partly garbled pages was fascinating.
I loved Teletext, and became the master in our house by memorising page numbers. At school we used Prestel to create our own pages in our Information Technology lesson. I do miss it, although the BBC'd red button is a worthy successor. Great video and thank you for bringing back some happy memories.
360 for Formula 1 news, 400 for weather, 101 for news headlines 😂
@@rajjy1976 don't forget 150 for the. Newsflash.👍🏻😀
The reveal button on some pages revealed hidden text that wasn't advertised so I used to press it on lots of pages to see if something came up. I liked when you were able to choose a subpage as waiting for page 23/49 to come back around could take a while and fastext really helped
Digital text never had the same charm and it felt like it could have had a lot more potential, although I liked that they could use pictures, but the pages always felt a bit empty
My secondary school had it's own internal Teletext service that I used to update. There was a computer terminal near the canteen and I would login and update things like the sports results for the different school teams. I can't remember how long it had been running or how long it lasted but it was the early 90s so only bulletin boards accessed through dial up was available as an alternative
Kids nowadays will never get to experience this
Then there was the little understood TCP (Time Coded Page) button!
It would have been better to call it a SUBpage because time had nothing to do with it, except for
one situation that I'll get to.
It allowed a given page number to have many different unrelated versions, and the viewer would press TCP followed by a four digit code between 0000 - 2359 and only the selected version would be displayed.
Commonly used for commercial shop window promotions etc.
The exception I mentioned was of course the Alarm Clock page (not to be confused with the Clock Cracker, that's quite different:) ). Here each of the 1440 possible variants of a flashing (but mute) alarm page could be sent in a 24 hour cycle.
The TCP button disappeared from handsets at some point
I was very lucky, my parents owned and ran a TV / Radio sales, hire and repair shop through the 70's to mid 2000's so at weekends my dad would bring home the latest tech, I remember when Ceefax first started, none of my mates had any idea what I was talking about at first they all thought I had gone mad and was talking rubbish🤣
One of the problems with Teletext as I remember, was data dropout, resulting in missing information if the analogue signal wasn't of a reasonable signal strength. The other problem was, if the TV signal suffered from multi path signal reflections, which resulted in ghosting as it was known of the TV picture. This ghosting disrupted the Teletext signal, resulting in either missing information or pages that wouldn't update. Generally it was a good information system, which worked very well in most cases. 👍
Yeah, I love it when people do their best to preserve, or/and even sometimes recreate, old things they've waxed nostalgic for!
I wasn't aware there was a separate decoder in the beginning. Its like history repeating itself (set top box and then freeview).
As a newcomer in London in 95, I've used teletext (888) subtitles to help me learn English. I remember watching Star Trek with subtitles, until I didn't need anymore.
I used to read the music discussion board on Channel 4 Teletext. It wasn't interactive but felt like a logical precursor to bulletin boards and discussion forums. I sometimes wonder whatever happened to two prominent contributors, Anastasia Black and Lucille Le Dark.
I was just about to write about The Void. Yes, I was a big fan and contributed. I'd fax in my comments and John Earls would type them up. I've tried to find him but he seems illusive.
Teletext seemed to come into its own near the end of its life, in the mid to late 90s, and probably as a result of true mass adoption when it was nearly always bundled with the TV. Just slightly later the same people widely adopted the internet. Sports and betting results, booking holidays, and computer game reviews were the order of the day. There was also a 'messenger' service predating the huge interest in internet chatrooms of the early 2000s. Prior to the 90s teletext was something your richer mates had, akin to the BBC Micro.
Great video Andy, Lots of memories, thanks.
Apparently Oracle made most of its money from holiday advertising, which is why it became such a big section on the site.
Next door neighbour was a big of an electronics whizz, and an early adopter. Maybe late 70s?Felt like magic. Loads of people I knew ended up using it to book holidays, once was built in to tellies
@@LittleCarMy parents used it to browse(very patiently!) for holidays.
In the early noughties attempting to bring them up to date, i bought their first pc. They were grateful but couldn't see the point of the new fangled internet...which changed a fortnight later when they rang up to say they had just booked a holiday with it 😸
@@LittleCar I thought Tom Baker mentioned it a few more times than the other features! Just in the form of jokes.
@@peterbradburn9115 In 1978 the learn TV servicing lab at college had a stand alone Teletext Decoder built entirely using standard Logic and memory ICs so you could be right about late 70s.
I know an old lady that still used teletext (or tekst-tv as its known as in norway). Teletext is still broadcasted over dvb-t in Norway!
Your retro tech videos are so cool in the perspective of a Portuguese user! Much like with SCART cables, I’ve still grown up with teletext in the early 2000’s, and yet again I’ve understood why I never saw it mentioned online - neither made it to the US in a broad scale. For the sake of it, I had to check and play around with it: yes, Portugal still has teletext up and running across multiple open channels!
For anyone curious, despite Portugal using digital TV for well over 10 years, teletext around here still looks like the more dated, early 90s UK version. I don’t think there’s much reason to invest in updating it, plus I reckon it’s mostly aimed towards older generations whom are accustomed to the way it has always worked; updating it would not only be expensive, but also counter intuitive, I suppose.
RTP Internacional which is broadcast in Poland too (at least on Cyfrowy Polsat's boxes) still has that vintage teletext.
My favourite Teletext news headline was "OAP in Supermarket Grape Slip Horror" but the page had cycled out when it came around.
I worked on a marconi developed videotext system (including geometric and pictures) for Singapore telecom. I wrote the GSE (geometric sub editor) and sent to Singapore to train people on it. Where I met my wife in 1988.
When Teletext/Ceefax was in development and you couldn't buy a TV with it, I built an adapter from a Wireless World design and modified my TV for it. Everyone in my street wanted one.
when i was a kid, i had no idea what it was, jet i loved pressing random numbers to see the pixelated images
We never had a teletext tv, but it was on as filler at certain times of day i seem to recall.
I 100% remember dad having to hit the tv though!
This is insane. The usa had nothing near this. I thought it was cool that our new vcr could auto set the time in the 90’s
I use Teletext still everyday in The Netherlands. For me it's one of the first advances pieces of high tech. I'm nearly 60 years old and know exactly when it came and what they impact was at that time. This was late '70 so revolutionary and so of another level. Today it's maybe old-fashioned for the younger generation but for lots of people it was a BIG PLUS in there home. And I'm happy that the NOS in Holland and ARD/ZDF in Germany Stil send Teletext or Videotext in German.
Used to see this Teletext advertised on TVs in Argos catalogues I glimpsed in my home country. When I finally visited the UK sometime 2005, I made sure to test it out. Kind of funny.
Brilliant video, thanks very much for all the time you put into it to make it so informative and entertaining.
In 2001, when I was at sixth form, a mate of mine took his dad around somewhere like Dixons to get a new telly. It was all back projection this and digital ready that, but all his dad wanted to know was "But does it have TELETEXT??" The red button service always seemed unambitious by comparison. Still remember being intrigued by the foreign language versions when we could receive European channels, the Star Trek rumours page (about 70% accurate) and, of course, Bamboozle.
in the 80's this was like the internet before the internet came about.
I hear it was popular in France as well as the UK but nowhere else.
That was an interesting trip down memory lane.
One aspect, often forgotten, of the Teletext developed Prestel was the Bank of Scotland and Nottingham Building Society running the first (as far as I know) online banking service. This was part of a subset called Club 403.
I used to play “Bamboozle!” all the time with my pal. Great times :)
I remember there being an advert voiced by Paul Merton and Richard Wilson on the BBC explaining digital TV, and how the signal could pass through buildings so there would be no loss of signal. I'm sure I've got it recorded on VHS somewhere, but I remember it distinctly because when we got freeview we always had poor reception, and the freeview was utter cack. Worse than analogue. And I just remember that advert every time the screen used to break up thinking Paul and Richard were both full of shit.
I was one of those Granada engineers with a red dustcoat and a Vauxhall Chevette.
Crowds of people would gather outside Curry’s shop window at 4.45pm in UK high streets on a Saturday to watch the football results come in on Teletext. There was a camaraderie of fellow football fans, certainly in Croydon if Palace were playing away!
Splendid! In the 80'sb & 90's I was often travelling within the UK. In the early 80's, of a Saturday around 16.40, I would find a Radio Rental's, or similar, shop that had a tv's playing in the window. I'd stand and watch to see what Bradford City had done. Without a radio there was no other way to know any sport's result until the Sunday papers came out.
With Teletext I could see what my team were doing any time I passed a tv shop window from 15.00 to 17.00 of a Saturday.
Really great video.
I owned a JVC S-VHS VCR in the early 1990s that had a teletext adapter box that clipped on the back and, in addtion to viewing teletext pages, allowed programming the timer by moving a cursor onto the required programme on the listings pages. When used togther with a channel broadcasting PDC which allowed the recording to start only when the programme started (even if delayed) it made for a very advanced system. Digital took a while to catch up.
PDC was "Programme Delivery Control" and used by some broadcsters in the UK (notably Channel 4 and BBC) . VCRs that used it would record the programme correctly from the start even if delayed by many hours (assuming the VCR was set to start at the programme scheduled time). A simple way of thinking of it would be the following exmaple. If you set to record a programme from BBC 1 at 8pm, the VCR would tune to BBC 1 and wait for a PDC start code along the lines of "8pm start". It could wait for hours and still record correctly if the programme was delayed by live sports for example (great for recording the X-Files on BBC 2 after Wimbledon tennis I remember). The system also included a stop code rather than simply recording for the time set, perfect for recording live events that often over-run. I think in theory PDC should have worked perfectly even if the clock was mis-set.
I don't think the pause feature of PDC for programmes split by news updates for example was ever actually implemented but I might be wrong.
Not many digital channels hold the now and next EPG for compatible recorders to give a similar experince.
There was me thinking the broadcast of computer software over Teletext was a fever dream as I found it completely by accident at the time. I seem to remember some code written in BASIC. I also seem to remember there was a random page where you could input a time and it would turn the TV off (and/or on) but that I'm not sure of
Apt timing, the day after the last Teletext service in Ireland - RTÉ's Aertel - shut down. Both in traditional mode and the 'digital' version on DTT.
As for "old" teletext capable TV - my 2019 Samsung smart TV supports Teletext. Its so common on satellite (TV has a sat tuner) in Germany still it'd have to.
For me, a 55 yo geezer, this video is a blessing. Thanks.
I remember seeing Teletext for the first time in c.1985 at my wealthy aunty and uncles house. My family were farrrrrr too poor to even have a TV with a remote control! The hours I spent typing in the page numbers and exploring it. Happy memories :)
I was actually surprised to check some channels in here still do offer it! :O Though most are down by now... It was always handy to check the schedule and short reviews of the scheduled movies.
Here in Switzerland Teletext is still popular especially for reading the news or sports results.
This was so useful for flight times and subtitles. Was so happy with a VCR that could record the subtitles. Made it so much possible for me to learn English as a Dutchie watching Top Gear, haha!
Without a doubt my favourite was Planet Sound on Channel 4, the music magazine edited by John Earls. Fantastic journalism through the discipline of having so few words available. I recall his review of a Chris de Burgh single: 'A welter of feedback before de Burgh unleashes his political rants...Oh for Gods sake, what d'yer think it's like'.
Also the Gig Guide. A rolling 26 pages of gigs in London (and some beyond). It stopped because someone couldn't find a 'business model' for it. Now you'd have to know who's playing and where when you don't know who or where.
Oh my heck, that's actor John Ritter ("Jack" from Three's Company) describing the captioning stuff!
Wonderful insight into teletext. I'd love to see one on Psion that you have in the background.
I remember using teletext back in the 80's early 90's but then i bought a pc and had the interweb at the grand speed of 28.8 via a modem.
I used to have the casio keyboard behind you. Nice to see an old Psion (sp?).
It was the "internet" before the internet 😊 i loved it
I remember checking tv schedules, reading news and football results on teletext. Good ole days
Excellent history lesson.
The original service and implementation on TVs did improve over the years.
Early sets were painfully slow. This did improve gradually, with the 4 fast text keys bringing a step up. As the video says, way later on, some TVs used much newer tech to cache or buffer large numbers of pages, and those pages would retrieve near instant….this however came late on in analog tv and is a proprietary enhancement used in some TVs….this was a massive step up from regular fast text…..
Ironically those fully enhanced TVs were much, much slower at accessing the new digital service when it arrived…because those enhancements for speed were for the old teletext, not the new service.
On the subject of digital text and bbc iplayer, that implementation has undergone 3 significant step changes since launching. The original working purely over air. Then came a hybrid period with a basic service over air and more content and iplayer video needing an internet connection. The newest tv we have is a little 2023 LG in the kitchen area…….this can’t do any bbc red button, iplayer, digital text without being connected to the internet. I guess that’s simplification of specification & cost cutting, but also very disappointing for some customers (not everyone has the internet, or the skill set, or maybe of a certain age).
As a child, i used teletext to occasionally look at pages with graphics. I had no reasons, it was just something to keep me busy.
For some reason it had to scroll through all the pages multiple times before it would show the one that i selected, although i often tried pages that didn't exist as well.
I remember buying an Ayr teletext decoder set top box - made of metal with a grained teak effect plastic film. £169.
It was called Aertel in Ireland 😊
Absolutely fascinating, thank you
The combination of the Pandemic and campaigning by Age U.K. (a charity campaigning for older people) was what led to the reprieve for BBC Red Button Teletext. However, t is a shadow of its former self with maybe just 100 pages of news, sport, and weather>
17:02 illustrates perfectly what I hate about the way MHEG is presented. Like overlay you can be trying to read some serious news on half the screen while on the other half something completely unrelated (like snooker) is happening.
14:03 looks unmistakably like a Sinclair ZX Spectrum graphical interface - with its BRIGHT 1 PAPER, and BRIGHT 0 BORDER...
Identical colour scheme, identical use of colours to avoid attribute clash etc.
There was actually a Teletext decoder for the Spectrum as well as the BBC Micro (which I noticed very early on produced the same as standard Teletext graphics).
Wow, the graphics do look a bit Speccy-like. The serif typeface is very peculiar; I've never seen Teletext rendered like that, except for on TV tuner cards for the PC where you could choose the font it used for the Teletext app.
It is actually a Philips P2000T which sported the same graphics chip as early Teletext TV sets had built in: Mullard SAA5050
actually the Oric line of computers use exactly the teletext method of generating colors and pseudo graphics.
It was called Teletext mode, I think the BBC had it too.@@martindejong3974
Ah watching tv on a saturday with Ceefax in goal! going crazy jumping around the living room in response to a score flashing up!
Great video. Love these tech ones. Waiting for the football pages to update the scores 👍
Teletext let you veg out on the sofa on a wet Saturday afternoon, recovering from your Friday night bender- watching Guns of Navarone on BBC2 while keeping an eye on Arsenal defending an ill-deserved 1-0 lead in the last few minutes at St Andrews. You make a good point about how this helped internet adoption - we were used to checking travel information on Ceefax, so happy to leap to internet
Formula 1 was page 365 from memory. I had an old Phillips Square aspect ratio TV. in the 80s and early 90s
Fun fact, teletext is still around in some nations including Poland, Switzerland, Portugal, Romania and several more European states.
I remember renting a VCR from Martin Dawes (a tv/electrical rental retail company) which had teletext built in. As I recall, you could ‘star’ a programme to set up the recorder. The recording would then display programme, date & time as a short banner on playback. Damned if I can remember the make!! … Just caught the Video + section!
I used to record TOTP in SVHS, I'll dig them out!
its still active and used in germany, we never let it die despite digital TV