Ceefax Final Broadcast: 'Goodbye, cruel world.' | Hacker News Reader

Ceefax Final Broadcast: 'Goodbye, cruel world.'

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96 pointslaumars36 comments

This is what I would play around with before I had a computer. You could only use it with a certain remote (with coloured buttons) and my folks didn't have one so I couldn't use it at home. It infuriated me knowing it was nevertheless coming across the air. I could only use it at my grandparents' place. I think they were pretty baffled that I wanted to spend so much time clicking around on a gaudy screen, but there were games and live news streams. Also kids shows would announce Ceefax pages at the end of shows so you could get more information. So much like the internet but years before I would have access. QQ.

So long, Ceefax

All you really needed was a "Text" button on your remote. The coloured buttons were for Fastext, a later innovation found on more expensive tellies. You posh nob with your posh grandparents. :)

I'm sad it's going, but I don't think I've looked at it in over twenty years. Do you remember BBC2 announcing "And now, some pages from Ceefax," in the afternoon? My cue to go outside and play...

Oh, and you talk about frustration: our first TV was a giant old brown-cased Grundig. No text, but the remote that came with it had all the buttons! Now that was a slap in the face.

They still did that every night until last night. There's cut-down version of last night's episode at the bottom of this article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20032882

Yeah. I remember getting up early to watch kids TV as it started, but first, 15 minutes of Ceefax and stock music!

No text button! :,( But yeah my posh grandparents had a pretty posh telly!

>> "And now, some pages from Ceefax," in the afternoon? My cue to go outside and play...

Kinda reminds me of this: http://imgur.com/AlzRd

Weather on Ceefax: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02196/map-ceefax...

Turner the Worm: http://www.yoursinclair.co.uk/pics/anims/dinosaurplanet.gif

Hah! Fantastic stuff! And of course Your Sinclair is a prime nostalgia trigger all of its own. Do you remember Bamboozle (I think it was on C4 rather than Ceefax.)

What about this then? http://www.grangehill.net/bbc1_clock_offair.jpg

I remember being blown away when they changed to this: http://625.uk.com/tv_logos/logos/bbc1_85.jpg

Funny to think about how little media we had back then, when today I can pull a slab out of my pocket and access a significant fraction of the world's movies, songs and books instantly. Reckon I had more fun then though, but that might be because I didn't have a hellish job and a family to feed. Ah well.

Cheers for the memories. Better stop now or we'll end up talking about Bagpuss and the bloody Clangers like a pair of students.

My aunt and uncle used to look after me and my sister when we'd finished school before my mum finished work, highlight was group playing Bamboozle. It was awesome, then occasionally the signal would die and it'd ruin your game.

Still going strong on most Norwegian channels. It's very good for a fast news/weather/stock etc. update, the interface is much faster to use compared to what you get with the web.

Modern TVs cache all 999 possible pages, so flipping between pages is instantaneous. With old sets you could end up waiting for about a minute in the worst case.

NRK (the Norwegian equivalent to the BBC) have a web based interface:

http://nrk.no/tekst-tv/190/

It's the same in Sweden (at least for public service broadcasting SVT). There is an Android app that I use regularly that gives the same user interface as the television screen. Text-TV as it is called here is still very fast in breaking news, as well for relevant though brief news headlines. It is one of the best medium for news still.

For example, the news that Sweden was on its way to turn around from 0-4 to 4-4 against Germany in WC qualifiers reached me by the means of Text-TV (the start page said so at 3-4), so I could tune it in and see the 4-4 goal.

http://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html

It's quite possible to broadcast teletext on digital services and that is done widely at least through Europe. The UK went for MHEG as a replacement. I found teletext faster and often fuller in detail than the equivalent digital services although the pictures are better on MHEG and it has the ability to embed broadcast streams (sometimes loops and sometimes live).

At least the TVs I worked on received MHEG if they were set to UK and teletext in other settings.

Author here, I wasn't aware of that. I'll add an addendum shortly.

Thank you

It's also done here in the United States. The Public Broadcasting Service has a for-profit arm called "National Datacast" that serves up a nationwide bitstream over the blanking interval of local PBS stations.

Disney tried a failed pay-per-view movie service over it. Some digital sign companies use it for loading new content. Microsoft tried a line of toys using the data stream. And I think TV Guide runs on here as well.

http://www.nationaldatacast.com

Huh. I thought we used one of the HTML subsets for our interactive services. Guess not.

That's coming. MHEG is going be replaced with hbbtv (a html sub-set). MHEG is too difficult to write and has a small number of people who understand the weird syntax.

Ah, that's good to hear :)

The German system, called "Teletext" is still alive and kicking. See for example http://ardtext.de/ and http://zdftext.de/ of the first and second TV channel in Germany. Even in times of the Web it's often faster to get the latest sports results through teletext (if you just want the results and no clutter).

Small point: Teletext is not the "German" system, it's the generic name for the service. The UK had several Teletext services, such as Ceefax (BBC channels) and Oracle (independent channel). Similarly ARDText and ZDFtext are German Teletext services.

The German name for the service is "Videotext", although this might just be colloquial.

The travesty is, it's still better than the Red Button service you get with brand new digital TVs (as far as reading text goes, anyway).

Just to be clear, the 'final screen' shown in that article is a mock-up that's been doing the rounds; it wasn't shown on the actual BBC Ceefax service.

Thank you, updated the article to reflect that

Yeah, the BBC News article at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20032882 has what were apparently the actual final moments of Ceefax (top video on the page) - they're a lot more impresssive.

To ease the pain, hasn't somebody made a user style sheet that makes BBC News web pages look like Ceefax? White on black. Fixedsys?

"BBC ageism"? How dramatic can we get? I'm sure there are more efficient and effective ways of providing people with information today. Memories are wonderful but let's not let our sentiment turn into outrage over turning off an outdated service that is no longer needed.

It's a tongue in cheek joke based on a number of BBC ageism scandals that have erupted over the past couple of years.

https://www.google.com/search?q=bbc+ageism+tribunal

Thanks, that puts it into perspective for me.

I think even without that context it ought to have been clear that the entire message is written to be humourous - not having a dig at you, maybe English isn't your first language or maybe you just have a different sense of humour to me, just saying that this was designed to be funny to all, not to those who spot the in-joke.

This was how I got 'niche' news before we had the internet. Every morning before school I would hit text, type in the page number and get the latest F1 news. If I remember correctly when there were multiple pages it would cycle through them automatically which meant that if you didn't read quick enough you had to wait for it to cycle back around so you could finish the page. It used to stay on each page for about 30 seconds so this was a real pain on 4/5 page stories.

And, similar to browsing multiple websites to read different sources, I would use the BBC's Ceefax and then switch to ITV to read their teletext service.

I guess it's a little late to let you into the secret now, but: that was what the 'hold' button on the remote was for - it would prevent the page reloading the next time the page number was transmitted. Of course, when you finish reading page 1, and 'unhold' it, the next version of the page to load might not be page 2, perhaps, but say, page 8. So you have to wait for 2 to come round again....

RIP Ceefax "Now and Next"! The most useful page on it!

I will always remember the way that if you are on page 643 and you type 641 it will go 644, 645, 646.. and other times randomly just straight to it.

That brings back memories - I had so many three-digit numbers into muscle memory for checking news, TV listings and so on, and used to be able to flip around really fast because I had a feel for the page timing. I guess Ceefax was long past its use-by date, but I'm sad to see it go. every time I use the Cable TV guide here in the US I wish I could call up Ceefax instead.

This story reminds me of the story of the recent closure of the venerable Minitel network in France.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141

Ireland's (http://rte.ie/aertel) goes off air in 6 hours.

Uh oh. Where is my Dad going to get his horse racing results now? NB: He doesn't have a computer.

red button.

Where I work, http://gg.com, we offer text message based alerts for running horses.

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