Ceefax and the Birth of Interactive TV | Hacker News Reader

Ceefax and the Birth of Interactive TV

bbc.com

61 pointsspeckx35 comments

The Ceefax team worked next to us at BBC News Online. Great guys!

They did almost all their programming on the live system. When they gave us simpletons from the web side of things a demo, the comment was: "well, anybody checking the football scores in Wales right now might be in for a bit of a surprise".

The software system they had to work with to program it all was ... "special". In one of those misguided attempts to make a scripting system "user friendly", the vendor had omitted any data structures or abstraction facilities worth mentioning. So the team built all the data structures out of Ceefax pages that were not being shown.

When it came time to connect my feeds processing system to Ceefax, I created a little XML-based markup language I called CML (Ceefax Markup Language) so that we could use WebObjects builder and the general template mechanism to build Ceefax pages. IIRC we also built a little converter of CML to HTML so we could preview those pages easily

Fun times.

When was this? I was up in TVC (and later in that newer building up the road from it) in 1996 prototyping the BBC News Online publishing system with Fujitsu ICL. Didn't meet anyone from the Ceefax team though.

Cool. I was there starting 2003, in White City. With the generally dysfunctional air conditioning. Not so cool :-(

Which motivated me to work outside on the benches of the rather lovely walkway leading up to the building. Which in turn motivated me to write a pretty self-contained system. No Oracle databases for you! Was very beneficial for all :-)

The Ceefax team was in the next room, between us and the White City Bar.

Of course no Oracle databases. That would only have worked for the ITV teletext service.

I once interviewed one of the guys who built the embedded software that decoded Teletext on the TV sets.

It was written in LISP.

The guy was absolutely facilitating. I wish I could have chatted to him in a less formal context.

Decoding VBI frames on LISP, this guy was something else.

In the early 1990s before shops had internet access a British company called “CardCast” [1] used non-public commercial Ceefax data channels to multicast stolen credit card data to high-fraud locations such as shopping centres and petrol stations.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/cardcast-in-talk...

I think those private data channels were provided via a BBC enterprise called “BBC DataBroadcast”. Their other users may have been the betting industry - perhaps parent OP might know?

What did the Ceefax backend look like? Were there cached proxies at the antenna site, or was it muxed live across the country?

In some countries Teletext never went away. The Dutch system is still up and running, and has a web front-end: https://nos.nl/teletekst

Have to deduct points for not using TeletextString in the certificate.

As does the Swedish one: https://www.svt.se/text-tv/

Classic 40+ years old pixels (I think) on the weather forecast page 401: https://www.svt.se/text-tv/401

Some time in the mid-1980s, at the proud age of someteen and three-quarters, I wrote a booth-style Ceefax emulator for my BBC Model B and demonstrated it at the local college’s computer club. The president of that club was a professor of electrical/electronic engineering named Harry White, who unbeknownst to me was also the director of exhibitions for Techniquest, a recently founded hands-on science education center in the nearby city of Cardiff. Harry had next to no budget and a pressing need to have exhibit-control software written, and offered me a part-time job whilst school was out. That was how I discovered people would give me money just for doing my hobby. Four decades later this is still the case. Thank you Ceefax, and thank you Harry.

> To access these pages, viewers typed the three-digit page number required into their TV remote control and waited a few seconds for information to appear on the screen.

You can tell from "a few seconds" that the author of this article never actually used Ceefax.

There must have been some TVs with a page cache? (Not that I ever saw one, admittedly).

It would have to be on and tuned into the right channel in the first place in order to build a cache.

Yes, they where. But you needed to wait to get all the pages, which wasn't a fast procedure. Around a minute or such, I can't remember.

It depended on the page. Clearly to have a complete cache you'd have to wait for everything to have come around, but common pages like contents or news headlines were transmitted more often than the others, so they entered the Fasttext cache more quickly.

Not the author but I grew up using this tech and I recall it being seconds rather than minutes.

Watch teletext now online!

https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/viewer/

Americans - turn on the telly, choose a channel (1 is a good choice, althought 6 is worth a look...) and hit the text button on the controller.

> and waited a few seconds for information to appear on the screen

Oh dear me. Later TVs had "fasttext" which cached the information so they could go to a page instantly. Some pages were sent repeatedly (like page 100, the index). But others you'd really have to wait quite a time for while the transmitter cycled through all the pages. I seem to remember Victor Lewis Smith did a joke about this.

Recent and related: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr54myyy671o.

Also related. Others?

Ceefax Simulator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095657 - April 2024 (102 comments)

BBC Archive 1983: Downloading Software via Radio and Ceefax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351869 - Nov 2023 (1 comment)

Ceefax from an old Raspberry Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29047592 - Oct 2021 (26 comments)

We See Facts: The BBC’s Ceefax Teletext Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18172532 - Oct 2018 (26 comments)

How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12246592 - Aug 2016 (64 comments)

Ceefax Final Broadcast: 'Goodbye, cruel world.' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4690257 - Oct 2012 (36 comments)

Ceefax: The early days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687417 - Oct 2012 (6 comments)

Ceefax service to end after 38 years on BBC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687316 - Oct 2012 (14 comments)

Ceefax - A love letter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3856928 - April 2012 (37 comments)

I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41645044

TIL where Ceephax Acid Crew got their name.

Honestly, it would still be popular today, even alongside the internet, if it hadn't been replaced by the non-entity that was "digital teletext".

I remember being able to have the live football scores over the top of any TV show. Most of the Ceefax/Teletext page would be 'transparent' with only a small box on the bottom of the screen showing the live updates.

Is it possible to do the same kind of thing with any smart TVs?

Modern smart TVs could hypothetically overlay virtually anything, however, you would not be able to overlay on to another “app” or channel as it opens cans of worms. For example, Roku had a lot of fraud from channels which showed one thing to the viewer while downloading ads in the background to persuade the backend the ads had been seen.

Back in the digital satellite era there was a transition where it was possible for the interactive content from one channel to be overlaid on the video of another as long as both were on the same satellite and underlying channel (a bit like “frequency” but not always 1:1). This is because digital TV multiplexes multiple videos for different user visible channels into a single stream with their interactive gunk, and the gunk can switch video streams. The fun part was this bandwidth is auctioned, and because every shady gambling company (half of cyprus it seems) wanted to be overlaid on sports the most expensive bandwidth was any spare around the sports channels. Not sure anyone ever made use of this in the end though.

The delights of MHEG-5 :)

Teletext? Not so much save for the 'reveal' button. Think of it as something like gopher but without the query selector, and instead of enforces menues, you could acces the 'pages' directly by the number instead of querying menues and submenues by number, too.

What? No mention of Count Binface's policy to bring it back?

In some places it never went away :)

And you can start your own service if so inclined: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/create-your-own-teletext-se...

Or his 50th anniversary video

https://youtu.be/0YmSxTIvs_M?si=rJmzh_1XJ_UsaQTf

I was very surprised Minitel only happened many years after it.

Minitel was considerably more sophisticated. For a start, it was _two way_.

Minitel was AX25 I think, among the Spanish Ibertex. Totally different tech, it was more bound to two-way teleco comms (and internet) than Teletext which was one-way, akin to a radio/TV stream with some cached data in-memory for further usage.

You could chat over Minitel for instance. Or do business.

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