Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

As a Swede, seeing Americans react to this website is interesting. Sweden introduced "Text-TV" in 1979 (it was pioneered by the BBC in the early 70's I believe), which means that reading text based sports results on your TV is a completely ubiquitous cultural phenomenon for anyone who grew up in Sweden in the 80's, the 90's and all the way up to when the Internet and smartphones took over.

Swedish state television (SVT) still provide "Text-TV" online at https://www.svt.se/text-tv -- many Swedes including myself still know some of the numbers by heart, 100 being the index and 377 being the favorite page of dads all over the country (live sports results).

I vividly remember being a kid (before DSL broadband or even dial-up was a thing in my life) flipping through the pages and guessing numbers between 100 and 999 to see where I would end up, long before I would end up doing the same thing on the early Internet.

SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind.

> SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teletext_services says “The Netherlands has run a regular Teletext service since the end of 1977 on the public broadcasting channels”. That would make that older. Ceefax was from 1974, so it seems there’s room for an even older still operating one.

Ceefax was shut down in 2012.[1] I have no idea about the Dutch one, it's possible that it's older.

edit: According to this site[2] the Dutch teletext was broadcast "on the open network" on April 1, 1980. There's also a Swedish source claiming that Swedish Text-TV is the oldest in the world.[3]

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20032882

[2]: https://over-nos-nl.translate.goog/organisatie/geschiedenis-...

[3]: https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1216116 "idag har faktiskt Sverige världens äldsta ännu aktiva Text-TV"

Same here in Germany, where regular operation of Teletext (or called "Videotext" here) started in 1979[1] and is still a thing. Surprisingly, I experience deaf people in my sphere using it. Of course, all the information is available on websites as well, but the strict form and reduced text amount per information in Teletext seem to make it very accessible for those who struggle with complexity of written language.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext#Deutschland

I think a common use case for this type of technology was subtitles for deaf people, so it's possible that they still use it out of habit. These days I think subtitles are probably sent to most TVs in a more modern fashion.

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