7 ms·
Ceefax Simulator
- ionwake 3y agoDoes the UK still have a live teletext or was it shut down ?
- ta1243 3y agoIt was shut down with analog TV, the DTT version was MHEG based "red button", which the BBC itself is shutting down (has shut down) as 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.
- ionwake 3y agoThanks for the reply m8
- jjbinx007 3y agoThis is great. Teletext was a big deal in the UK, a lot of people used to book cheap holidays from deals they saw on it. It was where you could check the news, the weather and maybe play a multiple choice quiz or two. Happy memories.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y agoIt was the best way of checking the score in a football match, in real time. When there were enough games playing to necessitate pagination, the wait for your team's page to come around added extra tension! Also, Bamboozle.
- petepete 3y agoBamboozle and Digitiser were fantastic, we visited most days.
- fecal_henge 3y agoAt age 8 I realised my Uncle looked like the guy off Bamboozle. We didnt see my Uncle anymore at that point. Now in memory my Uncle looks pixelated and yellow.
- ta1243 3y agoBamboozle was great, it had "hidden" pages with numbers like "4F5" -- normal ceefax numbers were 0-9 because that's what you could enter on your remote control, the hex numbers were only reachable from the "fasttext" red/green/yellow/blue buttons, so it was hard to "cheat", the wrong answer sent you back to the beginning, you couldn't just put the number back
- alexdbird 3y agoYou could still cheat. It’s not fresh in my memory but the correct page number was distinctive and the incorrect pages did not load instantly, so you could just press all the colours until you saw the right one!
- arrowsmith 3y agoAm I misremembering or could you play games on Teletext? I feel like I remember playing very primitive and janky videogames on the TV as a child in the 90s, but I might be making that up. 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.
- larschdk 3y agoThey had bingo games running on Teletext in Denmark. 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.
- rwmj 3y agohttp://www.ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Bamboozle%21 http://www.ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Bamboozle%21 was one. There was a short period where you could download games from Ceefax, although it required special hardware.
- actionfromafar 3y agoThe expensive TV sets cached the previous page, so you could flip between them. The really expensive sets cached ALL pages.
- rkachowski 3y agoI remember channel 4 had "bamboozle" - a basic janky quiz game - on their Teletext service, it was a daily adventure between friends to solve each day.
- bartread 3y agoThere were definitely puzzles, quizzes, and jokes. You could reveal the answers by pressing the "Reveal" button on your TV remote. I don't remember games per se.
- RowanH 3y agoKiwi checking in - was a thing here as well. 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.
- datascienced 3y agoThat got me in Tenerife!
- VBprogrammer 3y agoWe once got flights to Florida from Glasgow for £49 fly drive off of Teletext. Booked it Tuesday and flew out on Thursday. Those where the days!
- switch007 3y agoI thought all those were bait and switch. That's cool!
- qingcharles 3y agoI think everyone in the UK in the 80s and 90s were taking those crazy trips to NYC and Orlando from Teletext. You'd check every day to see how insane the prices had got. I remember people going to just fill suitcases with things like Levi's jeans which were massively over-priced in Europe.
- vmilner 3y agoI used to check the live world snooker championship scores on teletext in the 80s (when the BBC didn’t show it all live) Now skipping between it on iPlayer and hacker news in my phone…
- CodeCounselor 3y agoI remember how this was one of my first ”tech” fascinations in early childhood and a few years before the first dial-up modem arrived to the house. Something magical about how the tv turned och into something different and semi-interactive. Lovely reminder.
- kimi 3y agoFor full trip down nostalgia lane, here is a full BBS that runs on Minitel (that is the same display protocol as Ceefax but bidirectional). https://minitel.retrocampus.com/ https://minitel.retrocampus.com/ It runs on physical Minitel terminals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aJAwi0FqDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aJAwi0FqDo
- 082349872349872 3y agoalso https://multiplié.fr/en/5-21/objects/minimit https://xn--multipli-i1a.fr/en/5-21/objects/minimit (but with 3615 ELIZA in place of 3615 ULLA)
- mjg59 3y agoOk dialing in 360 for the first time in over 25 years and receiving modern F1 results was an absolute surprise. This is an incredible recreation.
- actionfromafar 3y agoWould be cool if this data coule be injected in the signal to a TV. Bring back Ceefax! :-D In some countries it still exists though, which is pretty wild.
- lordelph 3y agoThat's exactly what he did - if you look at this history section, he was broadcasting analogue TV signals to his house, and embedding his own Ceefax service in the signal!
- huppeldepup 3y ago888 should result in text on a transparent screen, whether or not there are subtitles available. Here it does nothing.
- zeristor 3y agoCeefax. 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.
- gpvos 3y agoNo, it could not. I haven't seen a recreation that was as accurate in its interface, nor one with such up-to-date data.
- beardyw 3y agoI built a demo app based on this format, but over a phone line. Blowed if I can remember the name of the technology. Early 80s anyone?
- actionfromafar 3y agoMinitel?
- beardyw 3y agoMm ... thanks, maybe, but doesn't feel quite right. Problem was it used a normal TV so when demoing it, if the line dropped you got whatever was on TV. Less than impressive!
- actionfromafar 3y agoPrestel?
- beardyw 3y agoYes! Just came to me too. UK Post Office system. 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!
- __michaelg 3y agoGermany's public broadcaster still offers an official website to see their current teletext: https://www.ard-text.de/ https://www.ard-text.de/
- amfan 3y agoSame in the Netherlands: https://nos.nl/teletekst https://nos.nl/teletekst
- tgv 3y agoFor a more minimalistic experience: https://teletekst-data.nos.nl/webplus?p=101 https://teletekst-data.nos.nl/webplus?p=101
- dahauns 3y agoHere's the Austrian: https://teletext.orf.at/ https://teletext.orf.at/ 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.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoI wouldn't be so quick to crown teletext as the king of succinct media. Just on the first page of the ORF teletext channel you refer to, there are lines flashing between advertisements for online gambling, tattoos and vegan (?) products with which to protect one's bladder and prostate. In order to navigate between news stories you have to memorize series of three-digit numbers or scroll through long indexes. After that, yes, in fairness, you get a nice simple text-only news article. Shame if you actually want the pictures though. 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.
- shrx 3y agoThe Slovenian national TV maintains a web version of the Teletext: https://teletext.rtvslo.si/ https://teletext.rtvslo.si/ My father still uses it (on the TV) to read the sports news.
- zeristor 3y agoGames reviews on 4tel, channel 4’s version. 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 https://youtu.be/ICoj8mxG0ww “BBC2 Pages From Ceefax - Mon 26 Aug 1996 - Slide Rule” https://youtu.be/j9Aiiekfqiw https://youtu.be/j9Aiiekfqiw
- robin_reala 3y agoThe games section was Digitiser[1] and was remarkably popular: basically everyone I knew in the 90s that was vaguely into games read it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitiser
- zeristor 3y agoI guess even then I was a bit too old. 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~Pages&page=41_Digitiser-nbsp~1995-1998&zoom=598 https://www.teletext.org.uk/index.php?cat=30_Archived-nbsp~P...
- GrumpyNl 3y agoWe still use teletext in the Netherlands. I check it every morning for the latest news.
- ErneX 3y agoIt’s also still available on Spain.
- sborra 3y agoItalian national broadcaster RAI still has the equivalent of this, up and running on the DVB-T2 digital broadcasting standard and also online: https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/index.jsp https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/index.jsp
- Nephx 3y agoNostalgic to see, similarly available by the Swedish national broadcaster SVT, https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100 https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
- hi_hi 3y agoNoooo, there's no page 370. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitiser 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!
- wrboyce 3y agoDigitiser (and Bamboozle) were on Teletext, not Ceefax.
- crtasm 3y agoThis is a great read: http://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/games-of-my-years-digitiser-part-one-by-mr-biffo http://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/games-of-my-years-dig...
- amiga386 3y agoIt is! I thought they were brilliant (even if they whinged about Amiga owners). There's also this fansite: https://www.superpage58.com/what-is-digitiser-guide-to-teletext-phenomenon.htm https://www.superpage58.com/what-is-digitiser-guide-to-telet...
- arcade79 3y agoNorwegian tekst-tv: https://www.nrk.no/tekst-tv/100/ https://www.nrk.no/tekst-tv/100/
- waihtis 3y agoI forgot about that ”scrolling algorithm” that the teletext has. It instantly feels familiar but I wonder how its actually implement. 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
- wizzwizz4 3y agoThe page data is transmitted every blanking interval. The most frequently-accessed pages are transmitted most frequently, and the infrequently-accessed pages are transmitted least frequently (so you have to wait longer for them to come up).
- rwmj 3y agoBut if your TV was expensive enough it had a bit of RAM that stored the pages as they were broadcast, so keying in the number took you straight there.
- alerighi 3y agoHere in Italy is still used, time to time I see my dad using it. It's also available online: https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/index.jsp https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/index.jsp
- jonplackett 3y agoI have a 6yo daughter and it’s always funny trying to explain old technology to her. Yesterday I was trying to just explain TV shows starting at specific times the of the day and even that seemed insane to her. Equally having to go to a shop to get a song was mind blowing. I haven’t had to explain ceefax yet so this will help.
- dilawar 3y agoMy coworker 4y old son have never seen money exchanged at shops since UPI has become so prevalent in India. He would just pick things at shop and walk. He didn't relate scanning QR codes with exchange. I should ask my coworker if he tried explaining physical money to him and how he reacted to the idea.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jonplackett 3y agoThe money thing is really interesting in that my kids don’t have any concept of how much any amount of money is. And if I say I don’t have money for something they just don’t get it because all I ever do is beep my watch on the reader.
- tialaramex 3y agoThat's interesting, it was about a decade ago now, but at a previous employer we actually went into classrooms to help them teach about money, as part of the social mandate of the corporation (they're a Credit Reference Agency, so, the bad stuff that's going to happen when you're bad at money as an adult is partly their responsibility, they reasoned that they should ensure kids are better prepared, and part of that is sending employees into classrooms to help with this material) 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.
- ta1243 3y agoFor those living in London, one of the Mayoral Candidates is promising to bring back ceefax. Not sure how he'll do it, technically I believe DTT can carry teletext data, although I'm not sure if modern TVs will process it. Back in the day I believe ceefax used to be generated out of a couple of beige tower PCs in a BBC office somewhere.
- zinekeller 3y ago> although I'm not sure if modern TVs will process it. Continental Europe still runs teletext-over-DVB so probably "just works".
- masfuerte 3y ago> one of the Mayoral Candidates Count Binface
- astrosi 3y agoThe candidate in question is Count Binface - who is part of a long British political tradition of joke candidates. Safe to say I think the implementation details of this policy probably aren't needed. https://www.countbinface.com/2024-manifesto https://www.countbinface.com/2024-manifesto
- ta1243 3y agoSometimes joke candidates get elected. 2008 for example. > 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.
- Retr0id 3y agoModern TVs support "HbbTV", and it's enabled by default in many locales. It's essentially HTML-over-DVB (including javascript), which is absolutely terrifying when you realize that there's no encryption or authentication, and that it's something you can broadcast for yourself with a cheap SDR, and that TVs run outdated browser engines with root-equivalent privileges.
- datascienced 3y agoI also cut my teeth learning to code on BBC Micro and occasionally using Mode 7: A screen mode where memory maps to teletext representation!
- mattlondon 3y agoI feel like this sort of limited but quite highly functional information system is something that the Gemini protocol fans et al should consider. 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
- maroonblazer 3y agoIs/was this something specific to Europe and UK? I'm in the U.S., born in '66, and I've never heard of this before.
- sparky_ 3y agoYes, it wasn't a thing in the US, but basically all televisions in Europe had a text mode for this, and it was very popular when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.
- joezydeco 3y agoUS televisions didn't have support for the blanking interval data and GUI, and it never got added to the NTSC standards. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgs0kbxo68w Keycom home service: https://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/history/Keycom.htm https://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/history/Keycom.htm
- Aloha 3y agoI think it did get added to the NTSC Standards - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NABTS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NABTS That said, there were several other competing standards offered at the same time including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_(teletext) 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.
- skissane 3y agoAustralia had it too (called “Austext”), it was shut down in 2009 In the 1990s, most TV sets could receive it, but I don’t think many people actually used it.
- ahmb 3y ago[flagged]
- secretsatan 3y agoI have a football fan friend who uses a teletext style app to get the latest results
- b800h 3y agoThis system already existed - it's open source - and while the page owner has linked the actual creator, the addition of a "donate" button is a bit suspect, in my opinion. 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/ https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/viewer/ Try Channel 6!
- jefurii 3y agoIf you like Ceefax you might also like Ceephax Acid Crew[1], discussed on HN previously [2], who uses a lot of vintage electronic music gear and puts actual(?) simulated(?) Ceefax screens in some of his videos. He's the brother of Squarepusher if that means anything to you. - [1] http://www.ceephax.co.uk/ http://www.ceephax.co.uk/ - [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30998462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30998462
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- levicole 3y agoSomeone should show this to Squarepusher's brother (aka Ceephax Acid Crew).
- vmilner 3y agoWeird flashback to reading on Ceefax in 1988 that Feynman had died.
- CapstanRoller 3y agoCan we simulate the Acid Crew, though? (this was made on an Amiga Video Toaster!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xq3srxF_B8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xq3srxF_B8
- NikkiA 3y agoIn 1990 I had a VCR that when you asked it to program a scheduled recording would go to the relevant TV listings page on ceefax/Oracle/4-tel and let you select the program from the listing using up and down arrows. Then, when the schedule started, it would even adjust if there were delays. THAT was my 'the future is now' moment. 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.
- ivorbuk 3y agoMy Grandma was already blind by the time the internet became a "thing" and, knowing I worked "on the internet", she would ask me what it was all about when she heard it in the news. After a few struggles we settled on "it's like ceefax, but much much bigger". She knew about ceefax, she was happy she understood what I did. It was a good analogy in the early days (mostly WWW work). 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.
- snvzz 3y agoPage overrides browser scroll behavior, making it really annoying to read.