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I have a 6yo daughter and it’s always funny trying to explain old technology to her. Yesterday I was trying to just explain TV shows starting at specific times the of the day and even that seemed insane to her. Equally having to go to a shop to get a song was mind blowing.
I haven’t had to explain ceefax yet so this will help.
7yod bought an underwater camera from a shop while at the beach. Basically a 35mm disposable inside a sealed clear case.
Told her it needed film to work which she accepted pretty easily (the store didn't have any).
A couple days later we find film, I load it.
She asks how to turn on the screen to take pics...
The idea of a view finder completely lost her.
Of course then I had to explain to her how something could even work without batteries, and my wife thought I was teasing.
She apparently has never bought/ used a camera without a flash. Thought even film needed a battery to work...
Yeah cameras are a fun one to talk through because at least there’s some fun bits to learn about - tbe idea of film and no batteries somehow now seems MORE like magic than a modern camera with a screen, which is pretty weird.
Maybe there’s a new saying “Any technology sufficiently ancient is indistinguishable from magic”
I got to see a child-lightbulb look from my wife when I said it's all potential chemical energy stored in a consumable cartridge. One's just much more specialized than the other.
My coworker 4y old son have never seen money exchanged at shops since UPI has become so prevalent in India. He would just pick things at shop and walk. He didn't relate scanning QR codes with exchange.
I should ask my coworker if he tried explaining physical money to him and how he reacted to the idea.
My friend was privy to a situation where a mother tried to explain to her child that they couldn't afford a toy that the child wanted. The child's reaction? "look mom, there's an ATM over there, if you don't have enough money, just go and get some from there!"
The money thing is really interesting in that my kids don’t have any concept of how much any amount of money is. And if I say I don’t have money for something they just don’t get it because all I ever do is beep my watch on the reader.
That's interesting, it was about a decade ago now, but at a previous employer we actually went into classrooms to help them teach about money, as part of the social mandate of the corporation (they're a Credit Reference Agency, so, the bad stuff that's going to happen when you're bad at money as an adult is partly their responsibility, they reasoned that they should ensure kids are better prepared, and part of that is sending employees into classrooms to help with this material)
All the kids we saw were capable, I'd even say surprisingly capable, of understanding the basics of stuff like budgeting. I remember we ran a scenario where they're helping a man to shop for himself and his wife, they're pensioners so they have a very inflexible income and an overspend is going to be a huge problem, and the kids were pretty careful, they understood that just because Mrs Smith likes flowers, if we haven't enough money for flowers after buying the intended groceries we shouldn't buy the flowers, they grasped that the choice isn't going to be "Buy both and it'll work out somehow", and that if you don't buy enough food you'll be hungry and so on. Even if all they were doing was telling us what they thought we expected, that's enough, as adults they won't be executed for going bankrupt, it's just important that's a conscious choice.
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For full trip down nostalgia lane, here is a full BBS that runs on Minitel (that is the same display protocol as Ceefax but bidirectional). https://minitel.retrocampus.com/
It runs on physical Minitel terminals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aJAwi0FqDo
also https://xn--multipli-i1a.fr/en/5-21/objects/minimit (but with 3615 ELIZA in place of 3615 ULLA)
This is great. Teletext was a big deal in the UK, a lot of people used to book cheap holidays from deals they saw on it. It was where you could check the news, the weather and maybe play a multiple choice quiz or two.
Happy memories.
It was the best way of checking the score in a football match, in real time. When there were enough games playing to necessitate pagination, the wait for your team's page to come around added extra tension!
Also, Bamboozle.
At age 8 I realised my Uncle looked like the guy off Bamboozle. We didnt see my Uncle anymore at that point. Now in memory my Uncle looks pixelated and yellow.
Bamboozle was great, it had "hidden" pages with numbers like "4F5" -- normal ceefax numbers were 0-9 because that's what you could enter on your remote control, the hex numbers were only reachable from the "fasttext" red/green/yellow/blue buttons, so it was hard to "cheat", the wrong answer sent you back to the beginning, you couldn't just put the number back
You could still cheat. It’s not fresh in my memory but the correct page number was distinctive and the incorrect pages did not load instantly, so you could just press all the colours until you saw the right one!
Bamboozle and Digitiser were fantastic, we visited most days.
Am I misremembering or could you play games on Teletext? I feel like I remember playing very primitive and janky videogames on the TV as a child in the 90s, but I might be making that up.
My clearest memory of Teletext is how slooooow and unreliable it was to load anything. But I sat it out and waited. Compare that to now where if your website takes an extra second to load then you can lose like half your traffic. Everybody was much more patient with technology back then.
They had bingo games running on Teletext in Denmark.
There were also interactive pages where you could phone in and press numbers to access a much larger set of information. You'd get your own temporary page number (that anyone could technically see), and the teletext broadcast equipment would insert your updated page into the stream when you pressed a number.
There were definitely puzzles, quizzes, and jokes. You could reveal the answers by pressing the "Reveal" button on your TV remote. I don't remember games per se.
That might be what I'm hazily remembering.
The expensive TV sets cached the previous page, so you could flip between them. The really expensive sets cached ALL pages.
Sky did a thing in the 90s called Intertext.
You would dial a premium rate number and you would then be read out a page number. You went to that page and used your telephone keypad to do interactive stuff and the page would update in near real time. The two biggest things were managing your Sky fantasy football team and banking from the Co-operative bank.
Our TV had a function to let you see all active page numbers so I would often go and spy on what other people were doing.
There were occasionally multiple-choice adventures using the colour buttons. I must say as much as the slowness is annoying in hindsight, I still have memories of how exciting it was waiting for your team's football score to page back into view, and the thrill of seeing your team had scored.
http://www.ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Bamboozle%21 was one.
There was a short period where you could download games from Ceefax, although it required special hardware.
I remember channel 4 had "bamboozle" - a basic janky quiz game - on their Teletext service, it was a daily adventure between friends to solve each day.
Once digital TV was a thing in the 2000's there were definitely games via the Red Button on Freeview.
Kiwi checking in - was a thing here as well.
Blows my mind what we all do now would have been absolute voodoo magic by comparison.
If we had gone back in a time machine and shown HDR 4k video upload, available to stream all around the world off peoples phones, live chat alongside, across devices / platforms.
I think they would have an aneurysm.
I used to check the live world snooker championship scores on teletext in the 80s (when the BBC didn’t show it all live) Now skipping between it on iPlayer and hacker news in my phone…
We once got flights to Florida from Glasgow for £49 fly drive off of Teletext. Booked it Tuesday and flew out on Thursday. Those where the days!
I think everyone in the UK in the 80s and 90s were taking those crazy trips to NYC and Orlando from Teletext. You'd check every day to see how insane the prices had got. I remember people going to just fill suitcases with things like Levi's jeans which were massively over-priced in Europe.
I thought all those were bait and switch. That's cool!
That got me in Tenerife!
Germany's public broadcaster still offers an official website to see their current teletext: https://www.ard-text.de/
Here's the Austrian: https://teletext.orf.at/
And it might be tempting to brush this off as just an anachronism to amuse ourselves with, but IMO this undervalues it quite a bit.
For example, the Austrian teletext still has almost a million daily users (in a country of 9 million) - let that sink in.
And there's a good reason: Conceptually, Teletext (at least when it's well maintained) is the antithesis to modern information media. There's neither room nor want for clickbait headlines, padded videos, tracking libraries, SEO and so on. You get a curated condensation of current affairs in a tiny package - a few hundred pages, each 40x25 7-Bit characters. The SNR is orders of magnitude above anything else out there.
I wouldn't be so quick to crown teletext as the king of succinct media. Just on the first page of the ORF teletext channel you refer to, there are lines flashing between advertisements for online gambling, tattoos and vegan (?) products with which to protect one's bladder and prostate. In order to navigate between news stories you have to memorize series of three-digit numbers or scroll through long indexes. After that, yes, in fairness, you get a nice simple text-only news article. Shame if you actually want the pictures though.
I personally think that the Web is a worthy successor in every respect, mostly because you have so much choice in how the page is displayed. Typefaces, colours, whether or not to display pictures - it's all up to you, the reader.
Mind you, neither the numeric indices for navigation, nor the lack of pictures, is really a stumbling block for the two user-types who most heavily contributed to / constrained the design — that being 1. blind people using screen readers who wanted to access a BBS-like service providing news, weather, etc., that would consider their access needs; and 2. deaf people who were accessing a given company’s teletext system under the expectation of it serving as the visual equivalent of said company’s IVR phone tree.
(In fact, consider how well teletext UX works as an efficient, navigable information-dense directory system for both blind and deaf and motor-impaired users, all inherently such that you just design once for the constraints of the system, and you get “the right thing.” There’s a reason governments latched onto it: it really works for everybody!)
The Web in theory is a successor to teletext in serving these needs… but it was really only the Gopher / HTML1 Web that was an inherent improvement. As soon as we started nudging content around with semantically-meaningless tables and divs to look better, the Web started to not work so good for users with these interaction difficulties.
That's true, but teletext isn't theoretically more constrained than the Web is. There's nothing stopping, for instance, teletext operators from producing pixelated animations or scrolling text effects, just as there's nothing stopping Web developers from adding accessibility-hostile layouts.
In Britain, teletext hasn't been available for over ten years now, but at the same time, a department called the Government Digital Services do an excellent job of making public websites accessible - complete with ARIA labels, semantic elements, all of that sort of thing. I'd easily acknowledge that teletext was ahead of its time, but I don't lament its replacement with the Web.
>I wouldn't be so quick to crown teletext as the king of succinct media.
Show me a current example that comes even remotely close (especially one not skimping on the "curated" aspect).
>[..]mostly because you have so much choice in how the page is displayed. Typefaces, colours, whether or not to display pictures - it's all up to you, the reader.
See, that's the crux here - it's not just up to me. It's up to the media producer what kind of content they offer for me to be able choose from.
Same in the Netherlands: https://nos.nl/teletekst
For a more minimalistic experience: https://teletekst-data.nos.nl/webplus?p=101
Switzerland too, in 3 languages -- although the amount of content drastically reduced over the years: https://www.teletext.ch/
Same thing with Rai, Italy's main broadcaster: https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/
Same with Danish public broadcast: https://www.dr.dk/cgi-bin/fttv1.exe/100
Finland's Yle has some English teletext starting on page 190:
Swedish public broadcaster https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
For those living in London, one of the Mayoral Candidates is promising to bring back ceefax. Not sure how he'll do it, technically I believe DTT can carry teletext data, although I'm not sure if modern TVs will process it.
Back in the day I believe ceefax used to be generated out of a couple of beige tower PCs in a BBC office somewhere.
The candidate in question is Count Binface - who is part of a long British political tradition of joke candidates.
Safe to say I think the implementation details of this policy probably aren't needed.
Sometimes joke candidates get elected. 2008 for example.
> Safe to say I think the implementation details of this policy probably aren't needed.
UKIP never got into government, but their policy did get enacted.
Modern TVs support "HbbTV", and it's enabled by default in many locales. It's essentially HTML-over-DVB (including javascript), which is absolutely terrifying when you realize that there's no encryption or authentication, and that it's something you can broadcast for yourself with a cheap SDR, and that TVs run outdated browser engines with root-equivalent privileges.
Hbbtv only embed the URL into the stream. The rest of the JS part came from internet still.
Maybe it first worked like that, but it's certainly no longer the case in newer versions. I've personally compromised a not-network-connected TV using only broadcast signals.
HTML+JS can be pushed via the "DSM-CC object carousel"
Funnily enough my memory of trying to implement the DSM-CC specs is that they are broadly equivalent to a denial-of-service attack on your brain
> one of the Mayoral Candidates
Count Binface
> although I'm not sure if modern TVs will process it.
Continental Europe still runs teletext-over-DVB so probably "just works".
Noooo, there's no page 370. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitiser
This takes me right back to grabbing my morning cup of tea and sitting bleary eye'd while waking up and reading the latest computer news before school. Hmm, not much has changed to be honest!
This is a great read:
http://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/games-of-my-years-dig...
It is! I thought they were brilliant (even if they whinged about Amiga owners). There's also this fansite:
https://www.superpage58.com/what-is-digitiser-guide-to-telet...
Digitiser (and Bamboozle) were on Teletext, not Ceefax.
Ok dialing in 360 for the first time in over 25 years and receiving modern F1 results was an absolute surprise. This is an incredible recreation.
Would be cool if this data coule be injected in the signal to a TV. Bring back Ceefax! :-D
In some countries it still exists though, which is pretty wild.
That's exactly what he did - if you look at this history section, he was broadcasting analogue TV signals to his house, and embedding his own Ceefax service in the signal!
888 should result in text on a transparent screen, whether or not there are subtitles available. Here it does nothing.
The Slovenian national TV maintains a web version of the Teletext: https://teletext.rtvslo.si/
My father still uses it (on the TV) to read the sports news.
If you like Ceefax you might also like Ceephax Acid Crew[1], discussed on HN previously [2], who uses a lot of vintage electronic music gear and puts actual(?) simulated(?) Ceefax screens in some of his videos. He's the brother of Squarepusher if that means anything to you.
- [1] http://www.ceephax.co.uk/ - [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30998462
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Italian national broadcaster RAI still has the equivalent of this, up and running on the DVB-T2 digital broadcasting standard and also online: https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/index.jsp
My Grandma was already blind by the time the internet became a "thing" and, knowing I worked "on the internet", she would ask me what it was all about when she heard it in the news. After a few struggles we settled on "it's like ceefax, but much much bigger". She knew about ceefax, she was happy she understood what I did. It was a good analogy in the early days (mostly WWW work).
I did get the reputation with her friends that I was a "ceefax expert" and would always be drafted in whenever her friends were struggling. I was "Mr Teletext" for a couple of years. (the other ceefax like service available in the UK)
Another memory was watching the live football scores on a Saturday afternoon. Waiting patiently to get to the right page and the agony when the page you wanted was skipped... having to wait another 8 pages before you were back to the right division (only to find out you'd gone a goal down). Happy days.
Is/was this something specific to Europe and UK? I'm in the U.S., born in '66, and I've never heard of this before.
Yes, it wasn't a thing in the US, but basically all televisions in Europe had a text mode for this, and it was very popular when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.
US televisions didn't have support for the blanking interval data and GUI, and it never got added to the NTSC standards.
For a brief period in the 1980s a few companies tried to provide teletext service, either over modem or a UHF decoder to a home computer or - more bizarrely - as a read-only presentation done overnight when no other scheduled programming was being shown.
Keyfax in Chicago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgs0kbxo68w
Keycom home service: https://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/history/Keycom.htm
I think it did get added to the NTSC Standards - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NABTS
That said, there were several other competing standards offered at the same time including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_(teletext)
The issue of course - like everything else with standards adoption in the states, the decoder wasn't mandated to be included with TV sets.
Australia had it too (called “Austext”), it was shut down in 2009
In the 1990s, most TV sets could receive it, but I don’t think many people actually used it.
I feel like this sort of limited but quite highly functional information system is something that the Gemini protocol fans et al should consider.
I'm not talking about the tech, but the UI/interface with menus, sort-of-hyperlinks, basic graphics etc. For iot or embedded or extremely low bandwidth things this sort of UI feels highly appropriate
I remember how this was one of my first ”tech” fascinations in early childhood and a few years before the first dial-up modem arrived to the house. Something magical about how the tv turned och into something different and semi-interactive. Lovely reminder.
In 1990 I had a VCR that when you asked it to program a scheduled recording would go to the relevant TV listings page on ceefax/Oracle/4-tel and let you select the program from the listing using up and down arrows. Then, when the schedule started, it would even adjust if there were delays. THAT was my 'the future is now' moment.
VCR+/Video+ was a step backwards from that luxury, having to look up numbers didn't really make things faster. It really felt like devolution until 'guide' systems started appearing.
Games reviews on 4tel, channel 4’s version.
Holiday booking on another version.
It used to be they stopped broadcasting during the afternoon, replacing it with “Pages from Ceefax” along with some bespoke muzak, the tune with the barking dogs made me smile.
Angela Ripon explaining from 1975: https://youtu.be/ICoj8mxG0ww
“BBC2 Pages From Ceefax - Mon 26 Aug 1996 - Slide Rule” https://youtu.be/j9Aiiekfqiw
The games section was Digitiser[1] and was remarkably popular: basically everyone I knew in the 90s that was vaguely into games read it.
I guess even then I was a bit too old.
Was this archived? Or has it passed like tears in the rain?
Looks like there’s some of it from the Wikipedia link: https://www.teletext.org.uk/index.php?cat=30_Archived-nbsp~P...
I forgot about that ”scrolling algorithm” that the teletext has. It instantly feels familiar but I wonder how its actually implement.
You input a page number and it seems to pick the right spot on the hundreds place, and then seems to arbitrarily drop into a loop for the right page number. Doesnt seem to have any logic, as if a spinner with the numbers 01-99 is constantly whirring in the background
The page data is transmitted every blanking interval. The most frequently-accessed pages are transmitted most frequently, and the infrequently-accessed pages are transmitted least frequently (so you have to wait longer for them to come up).
But if your TV was expensive enough it had a bit of RAM that stored the pages as they were broadcast, so keying in the number took you straight there.
I also cut my teeth learning to code on BBC Micro and occasionally using Mode 7: A screen mode where memory maps to teletext representation!
I built a demo app based on this format, but over a phone line. Blowed if I can remember the name of the technology. Early 80s anyone?
Minitel?
Mm ... thanks, maybe, but doesn't feel quite right.
Problem was it used a normal TV so when demoing it, if the line dropped you got whatever was on TV. Less than impressive!
Prestel?
Yes! Just came to me too. UK Post Office system.
We had one demo where we couldn't get a good connection to the computer. The operators rigged up a wire from the computer room direct to where I was doing the demo. It was 12 floors up in two different buildings, stretched across! I kept the blinds down so no one could see it!
Here in Italy is still used, time to time I see my dad using it. It's also available online: https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/index.jsp
Nostalgic to see, similarly available by the Swedish national broadcaster SVT, https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
Can we simulate the Acid Crew, though?
(this was made on an Amiga Video Toaster!)
Norwegian tekst-tv: https://www.nrk.no/tekst-tv/100/
Ceefax.
I’d not thought of this before, but could it display Fax pages?
An absurdly daft retro hack, and I’m guessing it has been done several times already.
No, it could not.
I haven't seen a recreation that was as accurate in its interface, nor one with such up-to-date data.
Page overrides browser scroll behavior, making it really annoying to read.
We still use teletext in the Netherlands. I check it every morning for the latest news.
It’s also still available on Spain.
I have a football fan friend who uses a teletext style app to get the latest results
Someone should show this to Squarepusher's brother (aka Ceephax Acid Crew).
This system already existed - it's open source - and while the page owner has linked the actual creator, the addition of a "donate" button is a bit suspect, in my opinion.
The hard work was done by other people - whether the modern news content was de novo I don't know - but it has been done elsewhere by other people, like the original, which has multiple channel and music - check it out here:
https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/viewer/
Try Channel 6!
Weird flashback to reading on Ceefax in 1988 that Feynman had died.
Does the UK still have a live teletext or was it shut down ?
It was shut down with analog TV, the DTT version was MHEG based "red button", which the BBC itself is shutting down (has shut down) as
1) It was never as good as ceefax
2) It was never as good as the internet, even when it launched in 2010
No idea about ITV, I barely know about BBC given how rare it is to watch live TV.
Thanks for the reply m8
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