Ceefax Simulator
nathanmediaservices.co.uk
nathanmediaservices.co.uk
I haven’t had to explain ceefax yet so this will help.
I should ask my coworker if he tried explaining physical money to him and how he reacted to the idea.
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.
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...
Maybe there’s a new saying “Any technology sufficiently ancient is indistinguishable from magic”
It runs on physical Minitel terminals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aJAwi0FqDo
Happy memories.
Also, Bamboozle.
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.
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 was a short period where you could download games from Ceefax, although it required special hardware.
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.
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.
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 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.
(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.
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.
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.
Back in the day I believe ceefax used to be generated out of a couple of beige tower PCs in a BBC office somewhere.
Continental Europe still runs teletext-over-DVB so probably "just works".
Count Binface
Safe to say I think the implementation details of this policy probably aren't needed.
> 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.
HTML+JS can be pushed via the "DSM-CC object carousel"
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!
http://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/games-of-my-years-dig...
https://www.superpage58.com/what-is-digitiser-guide-to-telet...
In some countries it still exists though, which is pretty wild.
My father still uses it (on the TV) to read the sports news.
- [1] http://www.ceephax.co.uk/ - [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30998462
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.
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
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.
In the 1990s, most TV sets could receive it, but I don’t think many people actually used it.
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
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.
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
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...
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
Problem was it used a normal TV so when demoing it, if the line dropped you got whatever was on TV. Less than impressive!
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!
(this was made on an Amiga Video Toaster!)
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.
I haven't seen a recreation that was as accurate in its interface, nor one with such up-to-date data.
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!
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.