UK's Teletext will go off air tomorrow, forever | Hacker News Reader

UK's Teletext will go off air tomorrow, forever

news.bbc.co.uk

43 pointshandelaar14 comments

This is really quite sad, Teletext was a fantastic example of what you could do with, in modern terms, basically no resources. A teletext page is 1k of data and you can only have 4 links to other pages, and it transfers data only during the field blanking interval (when the rasterization line is moving from the bottom right back to the upper left of the screen). Working within those constraints every byte matters, and in terms of sheer usefulness/byte nothing still can touch it.

When I was a kid, programming in MODE 7 was my favourite thing on the BBC Micro, it was easy to produce something professional-looking. Gonna have one last trawl through Teletext tonight I think.

I'd love to do the same, but in many areas of the UK (like mine) both Ceefax and Teletext have already disappeared. It's being removed along with the analogue TV signal region-by-region until the final transmitters are turned off in 2012.

Our analogue signal was switched off and despite having a digital ready TV we've not watched telly since. Spending license money on DVD rentals from the library instead.

I have fond memories of hacking the quizzes on Teletext as a kid.

You had four choices, represented just by colored buttons that matched up with the remote's buttons. All the page 'urls' were just numbers, but you couldn't tell what the number was before you pressed a button. Once you had, it would show up at the top for a few seconds while the TV waited for that page to be received.

The trick was there was only one wrong answer page, so if you hit a button and recognized its number, you still had a few seconds to select a different answer and progress.

I also used 5 fingers as bookmarks in Choose Your Own Adventure so I could jump backwards when I made a bad choice. Too bad these techniques never worked in real life!

Fond memories indeed. Like gaius, as a kid I had a BBC Micro, and created many a pretend teletext page in MODE 7. In my final year studying computer science in the UK, for my dissertation project I chose to try to get teletext available on the X Window workstations on our SunOS computers. I didn't get as far as the graphics side of it but I did implement a subset of RPC in BBC BASIC and 6502 assembler on a BBC Micro equipped with a Teletext Adapter and get pages coming across a serial line. I had my aerial attached to an upside-down broomstick outside the computing lab. Just after my project finished, broomstick and aerial were stolen, no doubt to be stuck in a similarly upside-down traffic cone in someone's bedroom.

So goodbye Teletext. Oh, and all that music they used to play in the background when all that was available late at night on TV was a selection of Teletext pages.

Ahh... fond memories. Bamboozle was an infuriating multiple choice "interactive" gameshow, a bit like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. There was even, for a while, a late night adult section called Teletext After Hours - I particularly remember a comic called Turner The Screw, about a profane prison guard. It really was quite innovative for a while (not to mention the BBC's Ceefax services with their downloadable computer programs), but inevitably turned into dross as they tried to monetize it with horoscopes and personal ads funded by premium rate telephone numbers.

I remember reading a story that Teletext After Hours used to share their teletext pages with the kids pages and they were swapped after a certain time. Only one morning the childrens pages weren't successfully swapped back over, and soon after the Teletext After Hours got cancelled...

Non-internet-using analogue TV owners will no longer have access to flight arrival/departure information, holiday booking adverts, horoscopes, and all the other stuff they've been looking at since 1983.

No word in the article about subtitles (closed captioning). Channels 3 and 4 use Teletext p888 to broadcast them.

Ceefax on the BBC will remain, however.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceefax

> "Subtitles will be absolutely unaffected by the withdrawal of the public information service.

Probably only for a few years until after switchover.

As a non-native speaker I often watch BBC series with closed captioning on, (especially nice with series such as Ashes to Ashes, where it also provides information about the music played) so I would really like to know how they will be made available without teletext.

I don't know how I will tell my father. He hasn't upgraded to the internet yet!

it should be continued at least for basic information needs. it just is easy to use.

Teletext used to distribute source code on their computing pages 600+. I didn't have a teletext reader and used to transcribe it from the screen using "STOP".

I never understood why modern TVs didn't cache every page in RAM instead of waiting for it to come round next time.

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