[HN Gopher] Ceefax and the Birth of Interactive TV
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Ceefax and the Birth of Interactive TV
Author : speckx
Score : 35 points
Date : 2024-09-27 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| weebull wrote:
| What? No mention of Count Binface's policy to bring it back?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| In some places it never went away :)
| timthorn wrote:
| And you can start your own service if so inclined:
| https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/create-your-own-teletext-
| se...
| chgs wrote:
| Or his 50th anniversary video
|
| https://youtu.be/0YmSxTIvs_M?si=rJmzh_1XJ_UsaQTf
| irdc wrote:
| In some countries Teletext never went away. The Dutch system is
| still up and running, and has a web front-end:
| https://nos.nl/teletekst
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Have to deduct points for not using TeletextString in the
| certificate.
| gilmore606 wrote:
| TIL where Ceephax Acid Crew got their name.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I was very surprised Minitel only happened many years after it.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Minitel was considerably more sophisticated. For a start, it
| was _two way_.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr54myyy671o.
|
| Also related. Others?
|
| _Ceefax Simulator_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095657 - April 2024 (102
| comments)
|
| _BBC Archive 1983: Downloading Software via Radio and Ceefax_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351869 - Nov 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Ceefax from an old Raspberry Pi_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29047592 - Oct 2021 (26
| comments)
|
| _We See Facts: The BBC's Ceefax Teletext Service_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18172532 - Oct 2018 (26
| comments)
|
| _How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12246592 - Aug 2016 (64
| comments)
|
| _Ceefax Final Broadcast: 'Goodbye, cruel world.'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4690257 - Oct 2012 (36
| comments)
|
| _Ceefax: The early days_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687417 - Oct 2012 (6
| comments)
|
| _Ceefax service to end after 38 years on BBC_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687316 - Oct 2012 (14
| comments)
|
| _Ceefax - A love letter_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3856928 - April 2012 (37
| comments)
| rwmj wrote:
| _> and waited a few seconds for information to appear on the
| screen_
|
| Oh dear me. Later TVs had "fasttext" which cached the information
| so they could go to a page instantly. Some pages were sent
| repeatedly (like page 100, the index). But others you'd really
| have to wait quite a time for while the transmitter cycled
| through all the pages. I seem to remember Victor Lewis Smith did
| a joke about this.
| b800h wrote:
| Watch teletext now online!
|
| https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/viewer/
|
| Americans - turn on the telly, choose a channel (1 is a good
| choice, althought 6 is worth a look...) and hit the text button
| on the controller.
| b800h wrote:
| Honestly, it would still be popular today, even alongside the
| internet, if it hadn't been replaced by the non-entity that was
| "digital teletext".
| sefrost wrote:
| I remember being able to have the live football scores over the
| top of any TV show. Most of the Ceefax/Teletext page would be
| 'transparent' with only a small box on the bottom of the screen
| showing the live updates.
|
| Is it possible to do the same kind of thing with any smart TVs?
| fidotron wrote:
| Modern smart TVs could hypothetically overlay virtually
| anything, however, you would not be able to overlay on to
| another "app" or channel as it opens cans of worms. For
| example, Roku had a lot of fraud from channels which showed
| one thing to the viewer while downloading ads in the
| background to persuade the backend the ads had been seen.
|
| Back in the digital satellite era there was a transition
| where it was possible for the interactive content from one
| channel to be overlaid on the video of another as long as
| both were on the same satellite and underlying channel (a bit
| like "frequency" but not always 1:1). This is because digital
| TV multiplexes multiple videos for different user visible
| channels into a single stream with their interactive gunk,
| and the gunk can switch video streams. The fun part was this
| bandwidth is auctioned, and because every shady gambling
| company (half of cyprus it seems) wanted to be overlaid on
| sports the most expensive bandwidth was any spare around the
| sports channels. Not sure anyone ever made use of this in the
| end though.
| mpweiher wrote:
| 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.
| ProxCoques wrote:
| 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.
| mpweiher wrote:
| 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.
| jameshart wrote:
| Of course no Oracle databases. That would only have worked
| for the ITV teletext service.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don 't know what to
| do with them_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41645044
| cjbprime wrote:
| > To access these pages, viewers typed the three-digit page
| number required into their TV remote control and waited a few
| seconds for information to appear on the screen.
|
| You can tell from "a few seconds" that the author of this article
| never actually used Ceefax.
| flir wrote:
| There must have been some TVs with a page cache? (Not that I
| ever saw one, admittedly).
| xattt wrote:
| [delayed]
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