[HN Gopher] Ceefax Simulator
___________________________________________________________________
Ceefax Simulator
Author : rwmj
Score : 147 points
Date : 2024-04-20 08:03 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk)
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Bamboozle and Digitiser were fantastic, we visited most days.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| Bamboozle 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 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Am 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 wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The expensive TV sets cached the previous page, so you could
| flip between them. The really expensive sets cached ALL
| pages.
| rkachowski wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| There 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.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| That might be what I'm hazily remembering.
| thom wrote:
| There were occasionally multiple-choice adventures using the
| colour buttons. I must say as much as the slowness is
| annoying in hindsight, I still have memories of how exciting
| it was waiting for your team's football score to page back
| into view, and the thrill of seeing your team had scored.
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| Sky did a thing in the 90s called Intertext.
|
| You would dial a premium rate number and you would then be
| read out a page number. You went to that page and used your
| telephone keypad to do interactive stuff and the page would
| update in near real time. The two biggest things were
| managing your Sky fantasy football team and banking from the
| Co-operative bank.
|
| Our TV had a function to let you see all active page numbers
| so I would often go and spy on what other people were doing.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Once digital TV was a thing in the 2000's there were
| definitely games via the Red Button on Freeview.
| RowanH wrote:
| Kiwi 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 wrote:
| That got me in Tenerife!
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| We once got flights to Florida from Glasgow for PS49 fly drive
| off of Teletext. Booked it Tuesday and flew out on Thursday.
| Those where the days!
| switch007 wrote:
| I thought all those were bait and switch. That's cool!
| qingcharles wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| For 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/
|
| It runs on physical Minitel terminals:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aJAwi0FqDo
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| also https://xn--multipli-i1a.fr/en/5-21/objects/minimit (but
| with 3615 ELIZA in place of 3615 ULLA)
| mjg59 wrote:
| Ok 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 wrote:
| Would 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 wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| 888 should result in text on a transparent screen, whether or
| not there are subtitles available. Here it does nothing.
| zeristor wrote:
| Ceefax.
|
| 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 wrote:
| No, 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Minitel?
| beardyw wrote:
| Mm ... 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 wrote:
| Prestel?
| beardyw wrote:
| Yes! 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 wrote:
| Germany's public broadcaster still offers an official website to
| see their current teletext: https://www.ard-text.de/
| amfan wrote:
| Same in the Netherlands: https://nos.nl/teletekst
| tgv wrote:
| For a more minimalistic experience: https://teletekst-
| data.nos.nl/webplus?p=101
| dahauns wrote:
| Here's the Austrian: 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| derefr wrote:
| Mind you, neither the numeric indices for navigation, nor
| the lack of pictures, is really a stumbling block for the
| two user-types who most heavily contributed to /
| constrained the design -- that being 1. blind people using
| screen readers who wanted to access a BBS-like service
| providing news, weather, etc., that would consider their
| access needs; and 2. deaf people who were accessing a given
| company's teletext system under the expectation of it
| serving as the visual equivalent of said company's IVR
| phone tree.
|
| (In fact, consider how well teletext UX works as an
| _efficient, navigable information-dense directory system_
| for both blind _and_ deaf _and_ motor-impaired users, all
| inherently such that you just design once for the
| constraints of the system, and you get "the right thing."
| There's a reason governments latched onto it: it really
| works for everybody!)
|
| The Web _in theory_ is a successor to teletext in serving
| these needs... but it was really only the Gopher / HTML1
| Web that was an _inherent_ improvement. As soon as we
| started nudging content around with semantically-
| meaningless tables and divs to look better, the Web started
| to not work so good for users with these interaction
| difficulties.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| That's true, but teletext isn't theoretically more
| constrained than the Web is. There's nothing stopping,
| for instance, teletext operators from producing pixelated
| animations or scrolling text effects, just as there's
| nothing stopping Web developers from adding
| accessibility-hostile layouts.
|
| In Britain, teletext hasn't been available for over ten
| years now, but at the same time, a department called the
| Government Digital Services do an excellent job of making
| public websites accessible - complete with ARIA labels,
| semantic elements, all of that sort of thing. I'd easily
| acknowledge that teletext was ahead of its time, but I
| don't lament its replacement with the Web.
| rice7th wrote:
| Same thing with Rai, Italy's main broadcaster:
| https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/
| tyingq wrote:
| Finland's Yle has some English teletext starting on page 190:
|
| https://yle.fi/aihe/tekstitv?P=190
| fnky wrote:
| Same with Danish public broadcast: https://www.dr.dk/cgi-
| bin/fttv1.exe/100
| mongol wrote:
| Swedish public broadcaster https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
| ale42 wrote:
| Switzerland too, in 3 languages -- although the amount of
| content drastically reduced over the years:
| https://www.teletext.ch/
| shrx wrote:
| The Slovenian national TV maintains a web version of the
| Teletext: https://teletext.rtvslo.si/
|
| My father still uses it (on the TV) to read the sports news.
| zeristor wrote:
| Games 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
|
| "BBC2 Pages From Ceefax - Mon 26 Aug 1996 - Slide Rule"
| https://youtu.be/j9Aiiekfqiw
| robin_reala wrote:
| The 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
| zeristor wrote:
| I 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~P...
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| We still use teletext in the Netherlands. I check it every
| morning for the latest news.
| ErneX wrote:
| It's also still available on Spain.
| sborra wrote:
| Italian 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
| Nephx wrote:
| Nostalgic to see, similarly available by the Swedish national
| broadcaster SVT, https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
| hi_hi wrote:
| Noooo, there's no page 370.
| 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 wrote:
| Digitiser (and Bamboozle) were on Teletext, not Ceefax.
| crtasm wrote:
| This is a great read:
|
| http://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/games-of-my-years-dig...
| arcade79 wrote:
| Norwegian tekst-tv: https://www.nrk.no/tekst-tv/100/
| waihtis wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| But 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 wrote:
| Here 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
| ionwake wrote:
| Does the UK still have a live teletext or was it shut down ?
| ta1243 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Thanks for the reply m8
| jonplackett wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| My 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.
| jonplackett wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| That'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.
| beerandt wrote:
| 7yod bought an underwater camera from a shop while at the
| beach. Basically a 35mm disposable inside a sealed clear case.
|
| Told her it needed film to work which she accepted pretty
| easily (the store didn't have any).
|
| A couple days later we find film, I load it.
|
| She asks how to turn on the screen to take pics...
|
| The idea of a view finder completely lost her.
|
| Of course then I had to explain to her how something could even
| work without batteries, and my wife thought I was teasing.
|
| She apparently has never bought/ used a camera without a flash.
| Thought even film needed a battery to work...
| jonplackett wrote:
| Yeah cameras are a fun one to talk through because at least
| there's some fun bits to learn about - tbe idea of film and
| no batteries somehow now seems MORE like magic than a modern
| camera with a screen, which is pretty weird.
|
| Maybe there's a new saying "Any technology sufficiently
| ancient is indistinguishable from magic"
| beerandt wrote:
| I got to see a child-lightbulb look from my wife when I
| said it's all potential chemical energy stored in a
| consumable cartridge. One's just much more specialized than
| the other.
| ta1243 wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| > although I'm not sure if modern TVs will process it.
|
| Continental Europe still runs teletext-over-DVB so probably
| "just works".
| masfuerte wrote:
| > one of the Mayoral Candidates
|
| Count Binface
| astrosi wrote:
| The 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
| Retr0id wrote:
| Modern 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.
| phantomathkg wrote:
| Hbbtv only embed the URL into the stream. The rest of the JS
| part came from internet still.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Maybe it first worked like that, but it's certainly no
| longer the case in newer versions. I've personally
| compromised a not-network-connected TV using only broadcast
| signals.
|
| HTML+JS can be pushed via the "DSM-CC object carousel"
| ldite wrote:
| Funnily enough my memory of trying to implement the DSM-
| CC specs is that they are broadly equivalent to a denial-
| of-service attack on your brain
| datascienced wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Is/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_ wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| US 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
|
| Keycom home service:
| https://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/history/Keycom.htm
| Aloha wrote:
| I think it did get added to the NTSC Standards -
| 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)
|
| 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 wrote:
| Australia 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.
| secretsatan wrote:
| I have a football fan friend who uses a teletext style app to get
| the latest results
| b800h wrote:
| This 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/
|
| Try Channel 6!
| jefurii wrote:
| If 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/ - [2]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30998462
| levicole wrote:
| Someone should show this to Squarepusher's brother (aka Ceephax
| Acid Crew).
| vmilner wrote:
| Weird flashback to reading on Ceefax in 1988 that Feynman had
| died.
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| Can we simulate the Acid Crew, though?
|
| (this was made on an Amiga Video Toaster!)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xq3srxF_B8
| NikkiA wrote:
| In 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-04-20 23:01 UTC)