Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

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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.

<Shudder>

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.

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?

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.

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

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