We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service | Hacker News Reader

We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service

paleotronic.com

64 pointsempressplay26 comments

For a while in the 80s the BBC Ceefax service offered the ability to download software [1]. You needed special hardware to decode the broadcast signal, and software to convert from text-encoded binary. It seemed pretty amazing at the time.

At about the same time, the BBC also broadcast audio-encoded software on its Radio 4 station after normal programming had finished for the night. I remember staying up late to record it onto C60 cassette tapes to load into a BBC Micro at school (and possibly my own Vic 20, my memories are a little hazy).

And now radio is broadcast on the internet.

[1] http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/telesoftware/

> the BBC also broadcast audio-encoded software on its Radio 4 station

The genius of modems is that they turned the mass of existing infrastructure for voice into infrastructure for data. We're familiar with the assimilation of phone lines and cassette tapes, and whilst this instance is less familiar, it's just more of the same.

Also there was'4 Computer Buffs' where code was transmitted by a flashing square on screen during a program: https://www.tvcream.co.uk/?p=2347

Here's a video of how you had to make the 'receiver' for this: https://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=89458723914479030 and here's an interview where there's the software being transmitted at the same time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULGDTtGZcN0

Teletekst is still active in the Netherlands, and they also offer a web interface and Android/iOS app to expose the info on your mobile devices. It is still beloved as all info is short and easy to consume while on the go. Fits perfectly into a Twitter loving society ;-)

I wrote a small command line program to read NOS Teletekst:

https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt

It supports colour but not the special teletext drawing characters as they seem to have no Unicode equivalents.

In the UK it was transmitted on analogue TV during the vertical blanking interval - and digital basically killed it off. How is it transmitted in the Netherlands?

Had no idea there was a forerunner for printing, Beeb Fax from before fax machies too! :)

Philips did produce some Ceefax TV's with printers though.

https://obsoletetellyemuseum.blogspot.com/2011/12/philips-26... (Scroll a couple of pages as they have the world's biggest page header!)

Wow, that guys site is a gold mine of classic TV information. There's several books-worth of information in there.

I know a guy who, even today, use Teletext for all kind of things (mostly sport results).

I remember ORF (Austrian TV), they had samples of QBasic source code.

Teletext was really a nice thing to have in Europe.

My dad used it here in the UK right up until the service was ended. I used to gently make fun of him at the time, but I now see that he knew it was the most efficient way for him to get the information that he wanted. He was optimising for time and simplicity, not sophistication.

Also viewable on Acorn's BBC range of computers (e.g. Micro, Master) by means of an external interface: https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Acorn-Teletext-...

Ceefax was actually published from these machines as well!

I had software to edit teletext pages on my BBC Micro, fun to play with but I never got my hands on the interface sadly.

My first programming gig as an intern back in the mid 90s was converting the output of a teletext decoder box into a web site by rendering GIFs and using image maps to make the numbers appearing on the page clickable for navigation. Gave me respect for the standard - so much information encoded in so few bytes!

Teletext have more than a million users in Denmark. Truly surprising to me but it is also kinda awesome. It certainly still serves a purpose. No ads, no noise just pure signal.

The swedish teletext is still also very popular. It's like the original internet and the internet for old people.

Even funnier: us semi-greybeards that do use this other internet, often still use teletext via app/web browser because it's such pure information.

It's news/weather/ and other info in curated and distilled form. Example: https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/101.html

German Teletext is filled with ads. FIND WOMEN IN YOUR AREA is what I consider ads.

The TV stations not broadcasting from Denmark, and not funded (at least partially) by public money had similar ads. Either for adult services, or betting.

What most view as "the real teletext" is the service provided by DR (Danmarks Radio), the Danish equivalent of the BBC. They are not allowed to show ads anywhere.

On the site [1] of the NOS (dutch broadcast foundation) there is even a big button in the header. Clicking trough the news items on the site is very slow compared to clicking trough news items on the Teletekst app.

[1] https://nos.nl

Ceefax has a long legacy: even today BBC News online stories are written so that the core of the story is told in the first four paragraphs, because that is what was sent to Ceefax.

(It's not just nostalgia, though the concision is good practice. It's because that format is still used by the BBC's "Red Button" TV information services.)

That's a based on standard newspaper practice; it's a lot older than Ceefax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

Yes, that's right but this a technical variant of that: it's literally the first 16 lines of the story, where "lines" are defined by the Ceefax standard

And if you're keen to make your own Teletext-Pages, there is an online editor here: https://edit.tf/

I follow a few teletext artists on twitter. This guy particularly springs to mind: https://twitter.com/Horsenburger

For more, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430660 and what that hyperlinks to in its turn.

Teletext is still active in Finland:

Yle: http://yle.fi/tekstitv

MTV: http://www.mtvtekstikanava.fi/

Some random picks from a previous comment of mine:

MTV used to have classifieds on their teletext pages that you input using your (landline) phone.

A centralized system.

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