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.
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”
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.
My friend was privy to a situation where a mother tried to explain to her child that they couldn't afford a toy that the child wanted. The child's reaction? "look mom, there's an ATM over there, if you don't have enough money, just go and get some from there!"
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.
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/
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
Readit News
I haven’t had to explain ceefax yet so this will help.
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...
Maybe there’s a new saying “Any technology sufficiently ancient is indistinguishable from magic”
I should ask my coworker if he tried explaining physical money to him and how he reacted to the idea.
Deleted Comment
It runs on physical Minitel terminals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aJAwi0FqDo
Happy memories.
Also, Bamboozle.
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.
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.
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.
There was a short period where you could download games from Ceefax, although it required special hardware.
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.
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.
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.
https://yle.fi/aihe/tekstitv?P=190
Back in the day I believe ceefax used to be generated out of a couple of beige tower PCs in a BBC office somewhere.
Safe to say I think the implementation details of this policy probably aren't needed.
https://www.countbinface.com/2024-manifesto
> 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.
Count Binface
Continental Europe still runs teletext-over-DVB so probably "just works".
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!
http://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/games-of-my-years-dig...
https://www.superpage58.com/what-is-digitiser-guide-to-telet...
In some countries it still exists though, which is pretty wild.
My father still uses it (on the TV) to read the sports news.