Bravo for the acronym, guys!

I remember jokes with the 'reveal' button :(

There were also user forums of a limited kind too. I've no idea how their comments made it from the users' living rooms onto the tellybox though - this was way before email and SMS were a thing. Did you have to physically send them in by Royal Mail?

"I've no idea how their comments made it from the users' living rooms onto the tellybox"

Imps, listening to everything you say.

If I recall correctly, it was actually done by post. I remember seeing PO box numbers. Could still have been imps too though if your TV was fancy.

The Paramount Comedy Channel had their own very good teletext service. They answered viewers questions but I can’t remember how you sent them other than by Royal Mail. I miss Ceefax and the ability of higher end tv’s to store the pages as they were received making looking something up blisteringly fast. I use the BBC text service on the bedroom telly to check the weather and travel every morning before work.

> I've no idea how their comments made it from the users' living rooms onto the tellybox though - this was way before email and SMS were a thing. Did you have to physically send them in by Royal Mail?

Duh. What do you think the TV Detector vans were for?

Surely you didn’t believe the government propaganda that they were to detect licence evaders? No! They cruised up and down the nation’s streets, their sensitive microphones listening for people yelling at their TVs. If the aforementioned yelling was a Teletext Reader’s comment, it would be taken back to Broadcasting House by the detector van.

My favourite was always the "Christmas cards" that various broadcasters exchanged with each other.

I used to love the Christmas advent calendars and the art, some of which was magnificent, bearing in mind the screen resolution and colour limitations.

And don't forget the computer software that could be downloaded.

And not forgetting the [1]Bamboozle quiz pages on C4, with Bamber Boozler and co.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboozle!

Perhaps your article boosted the service a little too much :-)

CEEFAX of course, I still remember the page numbers I used most.

Teletext was the popular rival, but who else remembers when it was called Oracle? (nothing to do with his Larryship).

Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics

who else remembers when it was called Oracle?

I certainly do....and the "Page The Oracle" advertising slogan (to throw another "no, not that Larry" into the mix)

(to throw another "no, not that Larry" into the mix)

And “no, not the shopping centre just outside Reading” too.

Me too, long before the internet was a thing the live Test match scores were on page 341 and you'd wait for the page to tick over and the batsman's name to change colour to show a wicket had fallen.

Used to happen far to often when England were batting so, I suppose you could say, at least some things haven't changed!

Channel 4 had 4-Tel I think.

I still talk about "paging the Oracle"

Wasn't 4-Tel the home of everybody's favourite pixelated quizmaster Bamber Boozler?

I can remember working on the special keyboard that was used to insert subtitles into the data stream for Oracle.

That was a long time ago and yes, I am getting old.... I had some hair on my head back then.

Considering the beeb were wanting to close down Ceefax spiritual replacement the red button interactive service in 2020 because they couldn't afford to keep it running and only changed their mind at the very last minute. Yet this young lad can throw together this service in his spare time using a few bit of kit from ebay and pull all the necessary data from the BBC website, I think the BBC should offer this guy a job.

Hear hear!

I don't know how the red button pages are created but judging by the number of duplicate stories on the regional pages, and the frequent truncations where you get just the first teaser paragraph of some overambitious BBC blogger's output, I can only assume it is a script of no great complexity. IIRC the claim was they would save £39M by dumping the service, but I can't see where that much is going!

It's a pity, as I think the red button data pages could be really helpful to people with no internet access. The BBC missed a trick not having some COVID information pages for example, instead of share prices.

I suspect, as Red Button is another stream on the DVB multiplex, that there is some charging mechanism for data capacity. If so that would dwarf the cost of running a server. This is where the Internet scores: the charging model is different, and small, so we get the amazing variety of stuff because the up-front cost is small until you need scale.

I have a funny feeling that the costs were for both the text and video service combined. It was pointed out by those who wanted to keep the service running that even £10m was a bit steep for running just the text. I think (but may be wrong) the BBC declined to separate the costs for the two and agreed to keep the text element going instead. I think the text is scraped from the articles on the BBC website. This is somewhat proven by the current number two headline and story on the F1 section of the text service.

Quiz: How well do you remember F1 in 2021

The 2021 F1 season is over but here is your chance to test your knowledge of the season.

Will younDNF or sit on the top of the podium?

That’s it.

Because Ceefax was "stored" in the top few scan lines of each TV picture frame, it gave us TV engineers a fine old time running around people's houses in the early 1970s as older TVs started to display the "funny moving dots" at the top of the screen. We had to either adjust the height* but some sets with iffy flyback also required some of the internal vertical alignment settings poking around with as well.

* for those customers incapable** of doing it for themselves.

** there were plenty of those - though they weren't as bad as the ones that took the backs of their rented TVs and played with the controls themselves. We even had one guy who had a habit of swapping valves around and then phoning up to complain that his set had stopped working!

Ah... the days of 'Radio Rentals'.

Indeed, though in my case it was Rediffusion.

Rumbelows.

Slightly inaccurate article, me thinks.

The system and technology was called Teletext. It was pretty much a joint development between BBC R+D and the IBA in the mid 70's.

When the service launched to the public, the BBC called their teletext service CEEFAX. The ITV companies, and later Ch4 when it launched, called theirs ORACLE.

In the early/mid 80's, the ITV/Ch4 ORACLE service was far better than CEEFAX. Far more pages, far more news and information, and loads of local content.

This was pretty much all lost when the ITV network was destroyed by the broadcasting act 1990, and the ITV and Ch4 services just became known as plain old teletext and just about all useful and local content was lost, and it became mostly a way of pushing adverts and commercial services - ie. holidays, bookies, etc.

A teletext Tv in the late 70's early 80's was probably the first "digital" device in the home (cf. pocket calculator) , and almost certainly contained the first mircoprocessor "chip" running software in the home. It was also the first gateway into a world of remote servers and online information retrieval.

Teletext services were adopted in many countries around the world, with the exception of the america's which showed little interest. Probably a case of "not invented here"

There was a bit of NIH but the 525 line sets in use at the time had less capacity to carry the signal than our 625 line standard. The result was a very, very slow system.

Speaking of info in the US... my local station had a info channel that was just a camera sliding along a wall of instruments.

There was a clock, thermometer, wind direction, wind speed, barometer, a handwritten weather forecast note, and a couple other things I've forgotten.

The camera would slowly pan along, reach the end of the track and reverse, so you had to wait a minute if you missed the reading of interest. It would dwell on the clock and forecast note at each end for a couple seconds.

So anyone else have this? Nobody else seems to remember such a thing.

and almost certainly contained the first mircoprocessor "chip" running software in the home.

The early Pong consoles might have a claim there. They were available 3 years before the Speak & Spell and Simon arrived in 1978. In the late 70s and very early 80s the Teletext was only on the higher end TV sets. Ours didn't even have a remote control in those days.

In 1975/76 Wireless World produced a set of articles to build your own Teletext decoder, reproduced here:

https://www.blunham.com/Radar/Teletext/PDFs/WirelessWorldDecoder.pdf

All digital logic without a microprocessor in sight, and you can see from first principles how to decode the signal.

Apropos not invented here: the BBC used a couple of lines, blanked before they got to the transmitters so the public didn't see them, to carry internal messages from Presentation in London to the regions.

For reasons of (I assume) ASCII, the decoding chipset used in the BBC internal displays didn't include the UK £ symbol - which at the time was 0x23. So the BBC, with typical attention to detail, carefully decoded the data, and when it saw that 0x23 being used to address the video rom, arranged that for the first three or four lines it showed (IIRC) the top half of an 'f' and then the bottom half of an 'E'...

In far too long at the BBC (thirty-odd years) I don't recall ever seeing the £ sign being used on a Presentation message...

Teletext Character Generator IC

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullard_SAA5050

SAA5050 Reverse Engineering

[2]https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=306311

available from Cricklewood...

[3]https://www.cricklewoodelectronics.com/SAA5050.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullard_SAA5050

[2] https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=306311

[3] https://www.cricklewoodelectronics.com/SAA5050.html

I remember when ITV had Oracle, and Channel 4 had two different Teletext operators (4-Tel and Oracle I think).

I was talking to a guy who maintains a site like this (perhaps the same guy?)

It turns out VHS cassettes with programmes taped off the TV still hold the teletext data that was broadcast with it, so I've been digging around for all my old recorded tapes in the attic

There's a couple of people doing that and archiving what they find - I find it fascinating.

It's a worthwhile endeavour as well, because I'm pretty sure nobody though to keep any of this stuff, and without those guys it would be lost forever.

Yes, it was S-VHS that could record the full signal. When I worked at the RNID, it was useful to be able to playback TV programmes complete with subtitles (from page 888).

It was always interactive - just that your TV had to have a text decoder to display it, and that didn't come as standard till the late seventies or so. I think the rolling pages were mainly intended as a more entertaining replacement for the test card in the wee small hours.

The BBC news feed is still working, I use it in preference to the home page:-

http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml?edition=int#

But still, recreating CEEFAX is mighty, worth a beer