Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024 | Hacker News Reader

Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024

linuxjedi.co.uk

109 pointssusam71 comments

> I managed to get it running, despite Teletext being killed off years ago.

It's still going strong here in Germany. The Teletext service run by ARD alone still had 19 M users 2 years ago [0]. You can even use it in a browser [1]. My father uses it heavily and with split-screen to get up-to-date sports results and news without all the BS he has to deal with on the internet as someone over 60 (notifications, cookie warnings, usability changes every 6 months, fear of accidentally "clicking somewhere dangerous", ads). I suspect he uses Teletext for the same reasons I visit HN for.

Somewhat ironically, his Teletext (his TV signal) has been delivered via Internet for over a decade now.

[0] https://www.rbb-online.de/unternehmen/der_rbb/rbb_in_der_ard....

[1] https://www.ard-text.de/

I should have maybe clarified that it was killed off here in the UK, I will amend it.

Is that true? I thought the protests in 2020 stopped the shut off?

Teletext and BBC Red Button are essentially the same, just with quite a few lick of paints. I think you can still access Red Button to this day?

They’re not the same and I don’t think they’ve ever been synonymous with each other (or at least not by people who work in the Broadcasting industry).

Red Button is the service that replaced teletext/ceefax in 2012. Teletext was an analogue service, Red button was a whole new digital service offering similar information, it’s entirely different infrastructure underneath, it’s not just a “lick of paint”.

You're right. My bad. I worked on a modernisation project for the DVB version of this in 2018. Internally we used to refer to it as Teletext, hence my confusion.

> Teletext was an analogue service

Teletext was a _digital_ service provided over an _analogue_ bearer - the modulation of the signal is continuous, not discrete.

"Teletext" in this context is a signalling protocol for transmitting text content over PAL TV, for decoding by an appropriate receiver.

The BBC's service was branded "Ceefax", ITV and Channel 4 branded theirs "Teletext".

The current 'red button' service is a completely different protocol running on DVB (Digital Video Broadcast, i.e. digital TV). Text packets are added to the MPEG-2 stream.

Ah, my apologies then. My confusion was that I didn't think there was a difference between the current mechanism and the old one.

FWIW you can still get Teletext over MPEG TS (DVB or IPTV), it's just already de-modulated, but even error correction bits are still there (and are useless).

In France most IPTV operators still use teletext for live subtitling because it eats much less bandwidth than dvbsub

The ITV/C4 service was originally Oracle; this was later replaced by “Teletext Ltd”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORACLE_(teletext)

Teletext/Ceefax has been dead since the analog switch-off in 2012. Red Button uses MHEG-5.

Same here. The Dutch public broadcaster even switched to a brand new cloud-based Teletext system last November. The old system was breaking down too often and not many people still knew how it worked, so a brand new system was developed to replace the old one.

Not only is Teletext still used very often, the public broadcaster is also legally obligated to have Teletext, and for aviators the law specifies Teletext as one of three legal options for pilots to check the weather on when preparing for a flights.

The Dutch news site tweakers wrote a small piece about this upgrade last week (use your favourite translation tool): https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...

I understood that it was mostly because the software was out of support for a while already.

I think it is used more via their website than via the television signal these days, at least in the Netherlands.

> You can even use it in a browser

Interestingly an intern at a telecoms research company where I worked in IT was tasked with using an OTA teletext receiver to convert teletext to web circa 1995/96.

I don't recall the details about it, other than that he got it working, after reverse engineering the (serial?) protocol the supplied software used. But nothing ever became of that project as far as I know.

In the netherlands, one of the earlier internet companies created this in the 90s as well. If I remember correctly it was first a java applet and then ported to JS with a CGI bin talking to the input hardware.

Yeah - it kind of blew my mind when I picked up a cheap DVBS satellite receiver box recently, tuned my dish to a satellite that carried German services, and found plain old Teletext running beautifully well on HD TV channels, rendered pixel perfect on my TV via HDMI. Mind boggling!

Being from the Netherlands originally, I know _their_ "Teletekst", not as much the BBC one. I couldn't possibly imagine it being of much use anymore. Similar to how the article started in past tense (before continuing in present tense):

> Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext.

I read this article from four days ago (link below, it's in Dutch) about how the Dutch broadcasting had recently made a significant investment to upgrade the old system, which was running on a local Windows 2003 machine/server, to a cloud-based solution that integrates with their other content-management system(s). It surprised me how many people still use this system. From the article: "the service still reaches a few million people per week through TV screens, and another 800,000 daily users via its app". (For reference, population of the Netherlands is 18 million.)

https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...

I got to say, having using Teletext again when writing that blog post, I do actually prefer consuming my news that way. That surprised me.

Teletext is great. It's highly curated and you can read all the pages in the morning in a few minutes. It's part of my coffee and morning routine.

Also mostly ad free, free of clickbait, concise, and really really fast. It's RSS before RSS.

Yeah, mostly... it depended on the station. Commercial stations in the Netherlands, to the extent they even bothered with Teletext, did at times do ads.

Yeah, same here in Spain. Just the same short news in any channel, neither left/right opinions from the journalists nor lengthy and unneeded details; next to it, some services mimicking newspaper sections.

In Germany and Portugal it is still used in some channels, for example for subtitles, although not much.

I worked on those systems and the joke was the TT100 really was the homepage of the Netherlands.

It all ran on a couple of SGI Challenge-S servers, these were basically re-packaged Indy's.

If you've been on the net that long you may also remember the original nu.nl which was utterly barebones and blistering fast. No ads, no eye candy, no opinions or comments, just the AP feed.

> Being from the Netherlands originally, I know _their_ "Teletekst", not as much the BBC one. I couldn't possibly imagine it being of much use anymore.

I know quite a lot of people in NL, some under 50, who prefer teletext to other forms of news and use it all the time.

McDonalds are currently running an ad campaign on UK TV with some fake Teletext pages and they haven't even bothered to get them half right. One of the pages is 53 characters wide, has (at least) two different incorrect fonts, and colours that aren't in the Teletext palette. Also I suspect the "MCTEXT" in the banner isn't possible to do with the control codes but my understanding of those is woeful.

I did think the HH:MM/SS clock was another mistake but that turns out to have been there since 1974 going off stock photos I found.

Yes lots of things in that ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ2z1be2EXQ) are impossible with the UK teletext they're trying to emulate, generated by a Mullard SAA5050 (there were others). It also takes a whole character (for the control code) to switch foreground or background colours. The fonts and graphics pixel sizes are all over the place, the only 'pixel' art available used a 2x3 grid within each character..

If they wanted a more faithful font there are plenty around, I've even done a couple myself: https://github.com/glxxyz/bedstead and https://galax.xyz/TELETEXT/

Ah, I use your Teletext font for my fake football league tables and scores (don't think I've made any egregious mistakes.) Many thanks.

e.g. https://social.browser.org/@wednesday_league

I remember when TVs had special features regarding teletext, like some sort of page cache where you didn't need to wait for pages to load. Weirdly enough, contemporary TVs don't do this, despite memory and parallel processing power for this not being an issue. Or maybe I'm just remembering this as working better than it did…

If your TV/VCR had this and ShowView/VCR Plus, you were riding the knife edge of the future…

They did, basically teletext iterated over pages so for one channel it was not that much data. I think teletext now is mvp feature that no one actually develops after it works most of the time. Thus worse user exeperience.

Fastext? https://twitter.com/grim_fandango/status/857683620831604736?...

Fastext is basically the four coloured buttons that are basically shortcuts to pages. It isn't related to page caching.

I think in practice, TV's that had Fastext also had memory for pages. I couldn't find much info so for any people searching in the future: search FLOF in https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_i_ets/300700_300799/300706...

I can't say my parents' TVs had zero memory, but it was at least very limited compared to my grandparents' TV.

The former was maybe fast if you were on page X and navigated to page X+1, X+2, maybe X+3 and X+4 (is that how the coloured buttons were usually arranged?) but for everything else was slow.

At my grandparents, every page was retrieved almost instantly.

It makes sense given how expensive memory used to be. I also remember my grandparents TV having much better teletext than mine.

>is that how the coloured buttons were usually arranged?

I think it depends on the system in use, but from my recollection it was a hierachical system - so from the home-page you may have links to News, Sport, Weather and TV Listings; from the News Page, the links may have been to National News, Regional News, etc.

Maybe when you got to an individual story one would be a link to 'next page' (or story) and the other 'previous page'?

One of the best uses I found was a low-fi daily quiz. Each page had a question and four answers, and you pushed the button for which you thought was correct. I think it also demonstrated that pages need not have a completely numeric id - I recall the quiz pages being something like '12;' - presumably to stop you cheating and jumping directly to an answer.

For more info on the quiz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboozle!

I believe Fastext was implemented with pre-caching. Since the page declared which the four page numbers were, the Teletext decoder was able to pre-fetch those pages while you read? This is what made it fast.

Essentially if you spent half a minute reading a page, the four coloured fast text pages were already received.

The Sony used in this blog page caches everything. The Morley connected to the BBC does not cache.

Being at a local, amateur radio station in Belgium in the 80's/90's we read some of our "news" or sports results from Teletekst. (Who were we fooling?) Being the amateurs we really were, half the time the page would flip while we were halfway through reading it on-air, with the cache not working or not loaded yet, and having to improvise your way out of it. I don't think anyone was really listening to these (former-)pirate stations by that time anymore, but it still was embarrassing. Oh, I am so nostalgic for those days...

Many moons ago, when silicon clock speeds could be counted by man, I had written some software that looked innocent, that booted from floppy, that played a game, but really walked through the ROMs and EEPROMs plugged in to the BBC looking for anything of interest, and then would dump said ROMs, if they were not recognized as anything standard, to the floppy disk. "My little ROM reaper."

At a trade show I hopped around a few booths, showing off some of my work, putting the floppy disc into various Beebs, usually with the permission of the people who worked the booth (usually). Letting a random person run their software from floppy on your computer at a tradeshow? It was the fashion back in the day.

My software dumped those ROMs quietly as I worked my patter on the sales person. Even the British Army BBCs used for recruiting succumbed to my little ROM reaper. They didn't have anything of interest in them.

For reasons unknown, at one booth, my game crashed, and dumped out some text, "reaping ROMs...", and in my youthful bravado I brushed it off and worked some more patter. One of the onlookers was a sales person from another booth who was very technical, a hardware & software developer and I don't think my patter worked on him, but that person worked for Morley. We got to talking about what my software was _actually_ doing. Which lead to some work for me.

I played only a small part in this particular device. There were other devices of theirs I played a larger part in, i.e. the Beeb RAM disc peripheral, and their never released 10MB Winchester. Which still sits on a shelf in my office. Which I conveniently forgot to return. Also there were other accessories from other manufacturers I had a small hand in for the BBC; the Digigraph, a light pen, a mouse, a genlock (used quite literally by the BBC (BBC Wales)) and a robot arm to name a few.

> The main difference between this and some of the others is that it is tuned digitally via the BBC

You're welcome. I recall that one feature, and a few late bug fixes, were my sole contribution to that project.

That is so awesome! The digital tuner is extremely useful. I think the only thing I wish I could do with it is bung in the tuning hex code instead of seeking or loading from disk. But that is a minor niggle and it works really well :)

Also, that may be your sole contribution, but I suspect that work is the majority of the diff from Acorn's ATS. That and switching the I/O to I2C via the user port.

Very cool project. This hits two of my nostalgia vectors: 8-bit computers and teletext. I remember as a kid (growing up in The Netherlands), I could spend a lot of time typing in page numbers in teletext, waiting for the counter to reach the page and see what kind of information would come up. I guess it was like an early version of the internet for me. But more mysterious in a way because the page number didn’t hold any predictive information on what would come up.

The Guardian posted an article about teletext in Sweden less than a month ago, I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38957703

I used to play the games on that when I was a kid at my grand house.

I particularly liked on called bamboozle if I recall. It was a kind of quiz game.

Loved Bamboozle.

I also booked a holiday from Teletext. It shows you the prices then you call to book.

From what I have been told, one of the other services supported by the software I used has Bamboozle still, but I haven't tried the others myself yet.

The recently released ZX Spectrum NEXT, an upgrade to the veritable ZX Spectrum platform of the 80's, has contemporary new-school Teletext capabilities:

https://dashboard.nxtel.org/Help/Topic/FAQ

I'm yet to enable it on my ZXSpectrumNext yet (too much fun playing old - and NEW! - games) but its on my list for the next few weeks.

There is also a thriving BBS community based around the ZXSpectrumNext .. everything old is new again, and we seem to be at a point in the road where anachronistic computing may soon give rise to an entirely new user platform ..

I like what they have done with the NEXT, but unfortunately I have no nostalgia for ZX Spectrums, I grew up in a BBC Micro household. I do have a +2 in my collection here, but I rarely use it.

The NEXT is capable of running other system cores, such as the BBC Micro. I was an Oric Atmos fan in the day, for me its quaint to be dealing with Speccie stuff now, but as soon as the Atmos core is ready I'll be booting that too ..

This is so cool to discover people are actively running teletext services.

Very good read.

There are quite a few! On Android, you can grab the TextTV app (may also be on iOS) and get feeds that are still operating. I used it while in Iceland (RÚV) to correlate some weather data, and Germany seems to have quite a few feeds.

I originally found it when I was trying to start my own micro Teletext service in the US for the fun of it, but the project got set aside to make way for more pressing things (aka life). I really should get back to it...

Let me know once you build it. Cheers!

Dutch Teletekst is very much alive online. https://nos.nl/teletekst the mobile version is quite popular: +1M downloads on the Google Play store. Somehow news here is faster than regular sites, especially live sports scores.

I'm pretty sure it's still used in Portugal. Older people in the countryside seemed to enjoy it when I was last there.

This should work fine on the composite output of the pi with no need for a modulator. At least here in Europe, where teletext is still very much a thing, it works from the external satellite receiver that’s connected this way.

It does, the first part of my post shows this on the TV. But for the BBC Micro I'd need to physically hack the Morley quite a bit to take composite input. I also have an Acorn Teletext Adapter, this can easily take composite instead of RF via a jumper.

Ah thanks for this clarification - I was wondering what the need was for the RF modulation and if it was necessary for just plain old TV use. Great project and thanks for bringing the possibility to my attention!

I knew a guy who did that with a microcontroller and hung it on the wall in the office, before data dashboards (or Pis for that matter) were really a thing.

I think a Mode 7 dashboard would really focus the mind on what's absolutely essential.

That's because modern digital standards (DVB-T/DVB-C/DVB-S/DVB-S2) actually added a way to encapsulate teletext data in the MPEG-2 TS stream inbetween usual MPEG2/H.264 and MP2/AC3/AAC audio tracks. Quite fascinating really.

Edit: I use Teletext here when I actually meant the BBCs DVB version. We would still internally refer to it as Teletext.

I worked on the infrastructure for Teletext at the BBC as late as 2018. We were charged with modernising the infrastructure for it so that in the future it'd be easier to deploy, and easier to Debug and modify in the future.

As far as I know the service that ran Teletext is still running to this day. The Carousel still gets sent out. I know there was discussion of killing off the data service, but I'm not sure if this ever actually got killed.

It should be noted that the Ceefax and Teletext of the 90s was replaced with a much more modern "Red Button" that ran into the 2000s. If Red Button still runs today, which by all accounts it might, it'll look vastly different than in this article. Much more like the following: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/22/BBC_Red_Butto... - Some of the mechanisms (Carousels, etc) are similar.

Regardless of whether or not it did this application will still be running. The Teletext infrastructure was used to also send out things like "Watch on iPlayer" for Internet Connected TVs that were not currently connected to the internet. It formed an important part of the marketing for HBBTV, of which the BBC helped form the standard.

I only worked on this project for 6 months, but it was one of the most interesting projects I have worked on. It was myself and another developer, and it was completed and deployed. A lot of code I wrote now sends out these packets to millions of homes in the UK.

Having to learn the low-level packet structure of DSMCC, and being able to efficiently pack these and send them out to multiple broadcast towers was incredible.

I will say this. One of the big discussions from our team during this time was how poor a decision it would be to turn off the Data Service. The costs of this service are negligible. It is very efficiently ran. The broadcasting towers are needed for other services, and it is a single Java Application, and some hosted services that, again, are ran for other purposes too.

However, for a lot of our more elderly users, this was a way to get them good quality news without having them rely on things like the Daily Mail. It served a public good, regardless of how little it was used. It is a one way service, a carousel of data, so we did not have good metrics on it's use.

It was to try to encourage users to move to Hbbtv, which of course someone like my Grandma would never move to.

If you're interesting in learning more about how Teletext works I used this resource extensively during my time at the BBC. https://www.tvwithoutborders.com/tutorials/dtv_intro/how-to-...

Imagine the old people that wont get scammed online by keeping the service running so they don’t need to go online.

It was just a needlessly disruptive move to cynically try to get an audience that would never be able to use their new services onto a new platform.

Someone using Teletext in 2018 was not going to be able to navigate the world of BBCs internet connected TV applications.

It was a decision entirely driven by "Sign In" metrics (that's still in place). It's a prime example of Goodhart's Law, which apparently no product owner in the BBC has ever heard of.

My wife grew up without television.

She knows what teletext is, but her mind was blown when I explained what the colored buttons on every TV remote are meant for.

You can use f-keys for the coloured buttons on the BBC Micro too :)

Now if only I could get a holiday to Lanzarote from there, for £99 a person. That would be true nostalgia :D

Your comment really triggered a trip down memory lane for me. I also remembered how crazy it is that we used to go and choose vacations out of paper catalogues at the travel agent.

I also remember reading the football results for my dad on my grandparents teletext on Saturday afternoon so he could check them against his pools picks. Strangely prominent piece of tech in my childhood.

This is a really cool project!

I did a not nearly as cool project several years ago, a command line NOS Teletekst reader for Unix/Windows. Might be of use to someone: https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt

It still exists in Denmark and other European countries. You can even access it via the internet: https://www.dr.dk/cgi-bin/fttv1.exe/100

God I miss Aertel. Only way to get cinema listings without buying the local paper on that day.

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