That, so the story goes, was the remit given to BBC engineers in the late 1960s: find a way to transmit a printable page of text so that the corporation’s transmitters weren’t simply left to idle overnight. Their efforts would eventually give rise to an iconic medium that would span five decades, become the basis for a global standard and – perhaps most importantly – let you check the lottery numbers on Sunday morning. (Well, you never knew.)
As is so often the case when a revolutionary technology’s lingering just over the horizon, it’s difficult to know precisely where the tale of teletext truly begins. Engineers at several different corporations were already experimenting with ways of transmitting text remotely, each with different goals in mind. The Post Office, who at that time were responsible for the telephone system, naturally wanted to use their infrastructure to boost the number of phone owners across the country. Boffins back at the BBC, meanwhile, had begun investigating ways to provide subtitled television programmes for the deaf.
Teletext (or Teletekst in Dutch) is still active here, and lots of people have the smartphone app for Teletekst installed as well. Fascinating technology that I used all the time when I was younger.
It was axed several years ago here in the UK. I used to use it almost every day for weather reports, tv listings etc.
I miss it greatly!
At a UK regional airport we generated our own Teletext for flight information all through the 90s (computer networks over any distance were still prohibitively expensive). Lots of airports did this, the big CRT screens hanging from the ceiling were all Teletext. If I recall correctly I think the company that made the equipment was called Jasmine? I even wrote my own system for creating pages on an Amiga. Fun times, thanks for a little nostalgia.
I built a Teletext receiver that plugged in the serial port of the Amiga, the plans for it was in one of the Amiga magazines, it was great, it had some PD software for it on the cover floppy and gave you full screen or PIP on your monitor.
Can’t remember offhand which magazine it was but it would have been around 1989/1990. They sure was good times!
Doesn’t BBC Micro has teletext display mode? (I suppose it frees some RAM and/or processing power?…)
And I thought teletext died with the move to DVB-T, guess I was wrong, judging by many people posting how they still read it in Europe… Oh well, I don’t use TV.
Lots of people have the Teletekst app installed, Thom? Not even my grandparents (both of whom are ~85) have the Teletekst app installed on their smartphones (yes, they have smartphones that they use quite a bit, esp. my grandpa, they’re quite modern!). In fact, the latest figures I’ve come across (which are quite recent) show that only 640.000 people have the Dutch Teletekst app installed. And it only works for *some* TV networks as RTL, SBS and Veronica have stopped providing the service. As of Jan 1, 2018, our country has 17.2 million citizens so 640.000 is just a drop in a bucket, really. It may be enough for the app and service to survive, but you can’t really call 640.000 “lots of people”.
Edited 2018-07-01 09:20 UTC
640k (assuming this number is true) is 5% of 12 million (adult population). That probably puts it in the top 25 of most popular apps in the country.
According to CBS StatLine, on Jan 1, 2018 there were about 3.5 million people under the age of 18, which makes the adult population closer to 13 million instead of 12 million.
But why do you only take the adult population into account? Children use smartphones and tablets too these days, so there’s no reason they can’t be using the Teletekst app…
Edited 2018-07-01 12:44 UTC
Nobody needs more than 640K.
😉
I’d still call the population of a city like Rotterdam “lots of people”.
640k ought to be enough for any app?
I still use it as a quick overview of all news. In Italy, even with all its mistakes (for instance they don’t understand that they shouldn’t use accented vowels, the result is a mess) Televideo (that is the Italian name)is still quite good.
Of course for more detailed news I read a newspaper, like The Guardian. In Italy AFAIK we don’t have anything like the Guardian, free and outstanding.
Still use it on NRK an various other channels in Norway.
My dad is still using Teletext; not only that, but he mostly uses his fancy TV for reading Teletext.
Internet news with clips, interviews,…->”no thanks, I’m good” 🙂
Usually he’s a channel flipper and can’t watch one channel for more than 15 min (except if there’s a documentary on wildlife or an old western flick), but teletext…he’ll read quite literally every topic the channel has to offer on teletext.
Edited 2018-07-01 18:13 UTC
I love this story about an old couple that traded stocks based on financial news on teletext.
They saw that a stock was rather cheap and bought a lot of it. What they didn’t know was that the company was near bankrupcy. As he put it “That wasn’t mentioned on teletext”. However their unusual trading pattern let investors to believe that somebody was saving the company and bought shares so that the share price increased. He then found out about the near bankrupcy and quickly sold all the shares.
But they did make a lot of money on it.
The full story in danish is here http://nyheder.tv2.dk/nyheder/article.php/id-34674455%3Aheldig-…
I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for Digitiser. I used to read it every morning before school – partly for the up to date gaming news, but mostly for the surreal humour.
I was one of the people who wrote to complain when humourless Teletext management stepped in and stamped out the irreverence.
I’m not sure if the Youtube show will recapture the magic, but I’ll definitely give it a go.