Teletext ad, 1978

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The Wikipedia page on Teletext is fascinating; apparently the BBC was keeping this going until less than two years ago.

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The Netherlands stil has teletext… I used it a few weeks ago when I was without internet.

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I believe there were text-based services based on the digital content embedded in the analog signal which are now impossible, or at least impractical, because text would have to be OCRd from the image transmitted now entirely, um, digitally. The irony is available from your nearest broadcaster.

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We had teletext in New Zealand and there were people who used it a lot, We never had it in our house but I remember my dad coming back from the UK in the 90s and saying how convenient it was for getting last minute flights.
We had a rental property with an included CRT TV up until 2011. It had teletext and I think it was cut off s year or so before we moved out so pretty recently.

Ahh, Teletext was great. I miss some of the stuff on there.

http://www.teletext.org.uk/index.php?cat=30_Archived-nbsp~Pages&page=40_Digitiser-nbsp~1995&zoom=10#zoom

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I still use teletext regularly.

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I worked for our state road authority in the 1990s and we fed data to teletext on the 7 network (Aus). I recall that it was a challenge keeping the system up to date on low bandwidth lines, and the protocol we used didn’t help as it was oriented towards infrequent full page updates rather than frequently updated tables of numbers.

It was the right system for its time. I am glad that the world has moved on though.

“Digitiser” was a computer games ‘magazine’ on Channel 4’s Teletext, which, as a kid before the internet was accessible was one of the few ways of finding out any information about games at all outside of monthly magazines.
If you lived in the middle of nowhere like I did it was an important resource.
Effectively it was the closest thing we had to the internet before that was widely available, and phone charges in the UK always limited the use of BBS’s.

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And the great thing is, Dutch teletext even has an app, so you don’t even need a tv :smile:

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Seems a lot more focused than the damned Interwebs thing. Imagine all the time freed up if the world went back to this!

Here in Germany the average person reading Teletext for general news is probably above the age of 70 at this point, but it also has its uses as a general framework for various special features. Those are things like subtitles, the name of the current program, following programs, time etc.

I’m teletexting right now. Technically.

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