Discovering that my TV had teletext as a kid was definitely one of my first "hacker" moments. I can remember enjoying the fact that I, a small child, knew all of the day's news events before my parents did.
Not sure how old you are, but at least here in Norway, people still use it. Though I myself haven't used it in probably 15 years.
Pr. Wikipedia, in 2015 9% of the Norwegian population used teletext. In 2017, that number had reduced to 7.5% - I suspect those are mostly old folks.
But to be fair, it was incredibly handy to look up specific things fast. If you wanted sports / betting results, TV-program, currencies, or whatever, you probably had memorized the page number.
There were lots of things like the Internet (in this sense) before the Internet. Go look at Genie, Prodigy, America Online, the Well, BBS systems, and many more. All centralized systems that were displaced by the decentralized Internet, which has since become much more centralized.
I recently discovered, that my parents still use teletext today. Because it is a quick, no nonsense, easily readable way to check some high level news or weather forecasts. And since it hasn't really changed in decades, they can just pull up the right pages from memory. Whereas I wasn't even aware it still existed. Certainly brings back childhood memories.
I used to do the same in my brother's house in the 80's where there was no computer, so I'd just pretend that the TV was a computer, and the screens were programs. Spent hours on it.
Ah, this explains why don't remember seeing Teletext:
> Adoption in the United States was hampered due to a lack of a single Teletext standard and consumer resistance to the high initial price of Teletext decoders. Throughout the period of analog broadcasting, Teletext or other similar technologies in the US were practically non-existent, with the only technologies resembling such existing in the country being closed captioning, TV Guide On Screen, and Extended Data Services (XDS).
In the 1980s the company that owned the Chicago Sun-Times, Field Communications, tried to bootstrap Teletext (the BBC's "CeeFax" branded as "KeyFax") in the USA.
Their plan involved broadcasting read-only teletext on their company-owned UHF station after normal broadcasting hours.
Read-only as in KeyFax was literally a broadcast image of Teletext, rather than actual Teletext. That way, people without a compatible set or decoder (everybody) could watch it.
That had the knock-on effect of users not being able to call up a page at will; they had to wait until it was broadcast.
Normal teletext you select a page (typically a 3 digit number from 100 to 999, although hexadecimal pages also existed)
Your decoder would then look at the vertical blanking lines with the data on, and wait for the page to match the one you selected. This could be fast (typically pages like 100 would be broadcast every second or so), or slow (page 693 might be sent once every 15 seconds)
The decoder would then show it. The decoder would only need a 1 page memory.
"Read only" teletext didn't include a decoder at all, it was the output of a decoder at the TV station which was sent via normal UHF means, typically with background music.
As memory got cheaper, "Fast Text" was introduced, each page would have shortcuts to 4 more pages (red, green, yellow, blue). These would then be stored in the background when they were broadcast, so the decoder needed 5 pages of memory, but the experience of the user was much better as there was less waiting for the next page they'd usually want. This also allowed "hidden" pages like "35F" to be used.
Towards the end of analog programming, teletext brought in on a PC capture card was stored and decoded by your media player. Computers obviously had enough memory to store every page so response was instant.
UK TV used to do this during down hours. I remember watching teletext pages early in the morning before our TV had teletext. I also remember the sheer excitement when we bought a TV with teletext on it, and my dad telling me he had friends who didn’t buy newspapers because of it. I was amazed.
This is great! Just FYI I use Teletext daily! It's great and is still used here in Croatia (we even have a Croatian Radio Television teletext app for iOS and Android!).
Also, just FYI, browsing the internet using a text browser is awesome! Try Lynx or something similar. Also get such an app for iOS|Android to read stuff! It changes the whole internet experience for the better!
These will show up better in a text browser than in a graphical one. I tried them under retawq/links/lynx and everything it's crystal clear-readable and usable.
No, they are complementary. Gopher is useful for old devices with DOS, Minix, a ZX Spectrum... devices like those.
Gemini is good for mobile phones as the screen shape varies a lot.
Most people in Gemini should provide their content in both formats. It's just a simple AWK script away with some help of fmt or par.
Ah yes, it's great! The HackerNews one needs more ASCII art tho ;)
Here's teletext in Slovenia: https://teletext.rtvslo.si/
There's news (109), weather forecast (160), train (185) and airplane (178) arrivals/departures, TV guides (200), foreign currency exchange rates (310), stock prices (313), gas prices (175), air pollution indexes (167) and so on. Too bad not many people know about it, let alone use it.
That is pretty neat! Tried it on mobile, and it was a bit constrained (likely due to my settings like font size and the like), but will certainly try on a full desktop browser shortly.
This is awesome! Is there a way to disable the text reveal animations? I am not sure about the intended experience, but on my device they appear quite slow.
Teletext is still popular in the some European countries. e.g. in prisons to send one way messages from families. For small amount of money you can buy an ad in the teletext and most of the prisoners here got access to the tv.
Sounds like Teletext was basically a digital-magazine protocol.
This is, a TV-station would continuously broadcast the latest Teletext-magazine for Teletext-clients to cache. Then users could view articles from their local cache.
Some TVs would show you which page was currently being sent in addition to the page number you were currently viewing. It went up sequentially, starting at 100 (which was the "home page"). That way you could time typing in the number (I remember on Ceefax 601 was the TV listings for BBC1) - say when it was at around 540 - and then you wouldn't have to wait so long for the page to "load".
Most pages had multiple "sub-pages" - so the BBC TV listing would start in the morning, as 1/5 - then on each refresh, it would show 2/5, 3/5 etc. If you really wanted to study a particular page before it would reload, there was often a "Hold" button that paused the refreshes. Then, when you "un-held" it would jump to whichever page was sent on the next update.
Watching the scores on a Saturday afternoon, updating across the various leagues, was a ritual for every football fan. (Maybe page 302 for football scores?)
Bamboozle was page 451 on Channel 4 - everyone loved that.
holy crap, thanks for the memories! I remember bamboozle, and also, I think on Channel 4, the "Tea Time Quiz", where you had to answer a question and be the first to phone in the correct answer, I remember winning on a couple of occasions!
Heh, in Spain we got several Teletext channels, and, as I didn´t have a computer until early 00's (I used them in the library or at friends' home) that was my pre-Internet.
Between 6 or 7 Teletext services you got tons of info and different news, oppinions, services and info about weather, books, music, and sometimes even short tales.
Jokingly I knew some Basic and C++ due to books and exercises at school and some learning centers outside... wild times.
In two or three years with Linux and a computer at home (2002-2005) I learnt how to read Teletext with XawTV+Alevt and event learnt how to pirate Nagravision in order to watch... ahem... some Canal+ "movies".
Also, a fun thing: if you find an MPEG ts "raw" recording from TV (not a Youtube cast) you may even be able to decode and dump the VBI frames and read whatever was happening on the Teletext just fine.
Crazy times.
Today the Gopher revival is the closest to the Teletext' simplicity.
An example of usage (I had no phone or Internet at that time).
Say you wanted to view the Formula 1 results , you open the TV, press the Teletext button then you would have to find from a table of content like page the number code/ID for the Formula 1 results , so it could be
311 - Formula 1 results
312 - Formula 1 pilots current points/results
313 - Formula 1 team points/results
football stuff could probably start at
301 - last week football results
302 - football stuff ###
So after you used it a few times you would remember that
sport stuff is starting at 300 , 301 -310 is football
310 -314 Formula 1 etc so you could just do
1 open TV
2 press teletext button
3 enter code from memory 311
4 view the information
Since there was no internet there was no other way to see this data anymore, so it was the only information on demand we had.
There was also a nice weather info page, I think it included more then a day so it was better then waiting for the news to hear the weather person tell you something.
It was essentially like having a text-only version of the web built into your TV, but back in the 80s. TV channels would broadcast the data for the pages in the gaps between video frames and a TV with the appropriate decoder would cache the data and use it to build up the complete set of pages, which you would then access by pressing the "text" button on your remote control. Each TV channel would broadcast its own Teletext service, with most channels offering a mixture of news, sport, entertainment etc.
It sounds (and looks) primitive by modern standards, but it was actually a wonderful technology that worked perfectly well for its intended purpose and was very information-dense. Sadly, we lost Teletext in the UK during the changeover from analogue to digital TV, but I think it's still alive in a number of countries.
It was possible for a TV channel to encode a small amount of data in the vertical blanking period between video frames - this is how subtitles were transmitted, for example. Teletext exploited this feature by encoding entire pages of text into that interval, each with a three digit page number. When the user requested a particular page number through the remote control, the TV set would wait a few seconds until the corresponding page was transmitted, then render it. More expensive TVs would have enough RAM to cache the pages ahead of time, so page access would be instant.
Correct in the 1980s to 1990s, but the later televisions had some RAM and could cache a decent amount.
By then, TeleText in the UK was on its way out. My dad used it to see the football and cricket scores, which you could usually overlay over what you were watching (the cricket or football, naturally).
Your comment made me wonder if maybe the HN in Teletext style page uses the Unicode code points you mentioned.
Looking at the GitHub source https://github.com/glynnbird/teletext/blob/master/index.html for the HN in Teletext style page however we see that this page and the font make use of Unicode code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane Private Use Area U+E000..U+F8FF, rather than using Symbols for Legacy Computing U+1FB00..U+1FBFF.
No idea about SDR, but you can receive them using standard DVB tuner cards/sticks. It is transmitted on its own PID in the MPEG transport stream (ETSI EN 300 472).
97 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/topics/teletext
Pr. Wikipedia, in 2015 9% of the Norwegian population used teletext. In 2017, that number had reduced to 7.5% - I suspect those are mostly old folks.
But to be fair, it was incredibly handy to look up specific things fast. If you wanted sports / betting results, TV-program, currencies, or whatever, you probably had memorized the page number.
(The Norwegian Teletext, or "Text TV" as it's called here: https://www.nrk.no/tekst-tv/100/)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/from-trash-to-t...
A year later, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Retrieval_and_Editing_Sys... got a bit more ‘net’ (https://www.brown.edu/news/2016-05-23/hypertext has a movie about it that is worth watching but unfortunately doesn’t show how it worked). At least, it supported multiple terminal types. That page also claims “FRESS still runs on the current Brown mainframe.” Iet would be amazing if that were true. Software that’s over 50 years old.
Does it work for you? I type numbers but nothing happens
You can even use it in the browser: https://www.teletext.ch
YLE: https://yle.fi/aihe/tekstitv
MTV (not the American one): https://www.mtvtekstikanava.fi/
Some people use them via phone apps as they tend to be faster and cleaner than webpages to check e.g. sports results. E.g. aText-TV (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.harjuconsu...) has many channels from a dozen countries.
SVT https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
What's the more common name of it? Most of europe seems to call it Text TV instead of Teletext?
Indeed great for no-nonsense news.
so that's what follows website obesity crisis.
http://www.digitextsim.com/452/
> Adoption in the United States was hampered due to a lack of a single Teletext standard and consumer resistance to the high initial price of Teletext decoders. Throughout the period of analog broadcasting, Teletext or other similar technologies in the US were practically non-existent, with the only technologies resembling such existing in the country being closed captioning, TV Guide On Screen, and Extended Data Services (XDS).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
Their plan involved broadcasting read-only teletext on their company-owned UHF station after normal broadcasting hours.
Take a loving gander:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVpUSaUMgbY
But since you stressed their plans being "read-only", was there something else to it?
That had the knock-on effect of users not being able to call up a page at will; they had to wait until it was broadcast.
Your decoder would then look at the vertical blanking lines with the data on, and wait for the page to match the one you selected. This could be fast (typically pages like 100 would be broadcast every second or so), or slow (page 693 might be sent once every 15 seconds)
The decoder would then show it. The decoder would only need a 1 page memory.
"Read only" teletext didn't include a decoder at all, it was the output of a decoder at the TV station which was sent via normal UHF means, typically with background music.
As memory got cheaper, "Fast Text" was introduced, each page would have shortcuts to 4 more pages (red, green, yellow, blue). These would then be stored in the background when they were broadcast, so the decoder needed 5 pages of memory, but the experience of the user was much better as there was less waiting for the next page they'd usually want. This also allowed "hidden" pages like "35F" to be used.
Towards the end of analog programming, teletext brought in on a PC capture card was stored and decoded by your media player. Computers obviously had enough memory to store every page so response was instant.
If you want to check out the service here it is: https://teletekst.hrt.hr/100-01.HTML
Also, just FYI, browsing the internet using a text browser is awesome! Try Lynx or something similar. Also get such an app for iOS|Android to read stuff! It changes the whole internet experience for the better!
Violoncello for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tectrasyst...
- Links (faster), lynx (delays), retawq (needs a little patch, but it flies on a toaster), w3m, elinks.
Also, Gopher, gopher revival is the "new" teletext :D.
EDIT: in a similar vein:
gopher://magical.fish
gopher://mozz.us
gopher://hngopher.com
https://lite.cnn.io
https://text.npr.org
These will show up better in a text browser than in a graphical one. I tried them under retawq/links/lynx and everything it's crystal clear-readable and usable.
Links: http://links.twibright.com/ (package name Links 2 in Ubuntu)
Lynx: http://lynx.browser.org/
Retawq: http://retawq.sourceforge.net/
W3M: http://w3m.sourceforge.net/
elinks: http://elinks.or.cz/
Gopher Info
Gopher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
Gopher ArchLinux Info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gopher
Gopher "Teletext server" setup instructions: https://nhaquariumsociety.com/downloadgofish/gofishUbuntu.pd...
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Gemini yet. (Yes, Gemini is the new Gopher now.)
No, they are complementary. Gopher is useful for old devices with DOS, Minix, a ZX Spectrum... devices like those. Gemini is good for mobile phones as the screen shape varies a lot.
Most people in Gemini should provide their content in both formats. It's just a simple AWK script away with some help of fmt or par.
Here's teletext in Slovenia: https://teletext.rtvslo.si/ There's news (109), weather forecast (160), train (185) and airplane (178) arrivals/departures, TV guides (200), foreign currency exchange rates (310), stock prices (313), gas prices (175), air pollution indexes (167) and so on. Too bad not many people know about it, let alone use it.
Here is a web demo of HNTerm: https://hnterm.ggerganov.com
I've been using haxor-news regularly for a few years now https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news
The put fake adverts/dates/sales and such on the Teletext to chat 'in code words'.
I think it happened in some Spanish prison.
This is, a TV-station would continuously broadcast the latest Teletext-magazine for Teletext-clients to cache. Then users could view articles from their local cache.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
EDIT: Apparently most implementations wouldn't cache something until the user requested it, then the user would wait until the next send.
There was no stored data.
Most pages had multiple "sub-pages" - so the BBC TV listing would start in the morning, as 1/5 - then on each refresh, it would show 2/5, 3/5 etc. If you really wanted to study a particular page before it would reload, there was often a "Hold" button that paused the refreshes. Then, when you "un-held" it would jump to whichever page was sent on the next update.
Watching the scores on a Saturday afternoon, updating across the various leagues, was a ritual for every football fan. (Maybe page 302 for football scores?)
Bamboozle was page 451 on Channel 4 - everyone loved that.
And the venerable BBC micro had a teletext adapter available for it too [2]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesoftware
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro_expansion_unit
Between 6 or 7 Teletext services you got tons of info and different news, oppinions, services and info about weather, books, music, and sometimes even short tales.
Jokingly I knew some Basic and C++ due to books and exercises at school and some learning centers outside... wild times.
In two or three years with Linux and a computer at home (2002-2005) I learnt how to read Teletext with XawTV+Alevt and event learnt how to pirate Nagravision in order to watch... ahem... some Canal+ "movies".
Also, a fun thing: if you find an MPEG ts "raw" recording from TV (not a Youtube cast) you may even be able to decode and dump the VBI frames and read whatever was happening on the Teletext just fine.
Crazy times.
Today the Gopher revival is the closest to the Teletext' simplicity.
gopher://hngopher.com
Have fun.
I’m a noob don’t know much and how was it really used back then
An example of usage (I had no phone or Internet at that time). Say you wanted to view the Formula 1 results , you open the TV, press the Teletext button then you would have to find from a table of content like page the number code/ID for the Formula 1 results , so it could be
311 - Formula 1 results
312 - Formula 1 pilots current points/results
313 - Formula 1 team points/results
football stuff could probably start at
301 - last week football results
302 - football stuff ###
So after you used it a few times you would remember that sport stuff is starting at 300 , 301 -310 is football 310 -314 Formula 1 etc so you could just do
1 open TV
2 press teletext button
3 enter code from memory 311
4 view the information
Since there was no internet there was no other way to see this data anymore, so it was the only information on demand we had.
There was also a nice weather info page, I think it included more then a day so it was better then waiting for the news to hear the weather person tell you something.
It sounds (and looks) primitive by modern standards, but it was actually a wonderful technology that worked perfectly well for its intended purpose and was very information-dense. Sadly, we lost Teletext in the UK during the changeover from analogue to digital TV, but I think it's still alive in a number of countries.
I’m very amazed this thing existed back in the day when internet wasn’t a thing
http://beebwiki.mdfs.net/MODE_7
Very cool and nostalgic, otherwise!
By then, TeleText in the UK was on its way out. My dad used it to see the football and cricket scores, which you could usually overlay over what you were watching (the cricket or football, naturally).
So now the teletext characters are available, and this site would be a perfect place to use them. I'm not sure about font support yet though.
Your comment made me wonder if maybe the HN in Teletext style page uses the Unicode code points you mentioned.
Looking at the GitHub source https://github.com/glynnbird/teletext/blob/master/index.html for the HN in Teletext style page however we see that this page and the font make use of Unicode code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane Private Use Area U+E000..U+F8FF, rather than using Symbols for Legacy Computing U+1FB00..U+1FBFF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
Also would prefer Github sources to be printed on low quality paper with more GOTOs.
Sincerely,
Adrian Mole Age 13.754101587