> I managed to get it running, despite Teletext being killed off years ago.
It's still going strong here in Germany. The Teletext service run by ARD alone still had 19 M users 2 years ago [0]. You can even use it in a browser [1]. My father uses it heavily and with split-screen to get up-to-date sports results and news without all the BS he has to deal with on the internet as someone over 60 (notifications, cookie warnings, usability changes every 6 months, fear of accidentally "clicking somewhere dangerous", ads). I suspect he uses Teletext for the same reasons I visit HN for.
Somewhat ironically, his Teletext (his TV signal) has been delivered via Internet for over a decade now.
Same here. The Dutch public broadcaster even switched to a brand new cloud-based Teletext system last November. The old system was breaking down too often and not many people still knew how it worked, so a brand new system was developed to replace the old one.
Not only is Teletext still used very often, the public broadcaster is also legally obligated to have Teletext, and for aviators the law specifies Teletext as one of three legal options for pilots to check the weather on when preparing for a flights.
Yeah - it kind of blew my mind when I picked up a cheap DVBS satellite receiver box recently, tuned my dish to a satellite that carried German services, and found plain old Teletext running beautifully well on HD TV channels, rendered pixel perfect on my TV via HDMI. Mind boggling!
Interestingly an intern at a telecoms research company where I worked in IT was tasked with using an OTA teletext receiver to convert teletext to web circa 1995/96.
I don't recall the details about it, other than that he got it working, after reverse engineering the (serial?) protocol the supplied software used. But nothing ever became of that project as far as I know.
Being from the Netherlands originally, I know _their_ "Teletekst", not as much the BBC one. I couldn't possibly imagine it being of much use anymore. Similar to how the article started in past tense (before continuing in present tense):
> Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext.
I read this article from four days ago (link below, it's in Dutch) about how the Dutch broadcasting had recently made a significant investment to upgrade the old system, which was running on a local Windows 2003 machine/server, to a cloud-based solution that integrates with their other content-management system(s). It surprised me how many people still use this system. From the article: "the service still reaches a few million people per week through TV screens, and another 800,000 daily users via its app". (For reference, population of the Netherlands is 18 million.)
I worked on those systems and the joke was the TT100 really was the homepage of the Netherlands.
It all ran on a couple of SGI Challenge-S servers, these were basically re-packaged Indy's.
If you've been on the net that long you may also remember the original nu.nl which was utterly barebones and blistering fast. No ads, no eye candy, no opinions or comments, just the AP feed.
> Being from the Netherlands originally, I know _their_ "Teletekst", not as much the BBC one. I couldn't possibly imagine it being of much use anymore.
I know quite a lot of people in NL, some under 50, who prefer teletext to other forms of news and use it all the time.
McDonalds are currently running an ad campaign on UK TV with some fake Teletext pages and they haven't even bothered to get them half right. One of the pages is 53 characters wide, has (at least) two different incorrect fonts, and colours that aren't in the Teletext palette. Also I suspect the "MCTEXT" in the banner isn't possible to do with the control codes but my understanding of those is woeful.
I did think the HH:MM/SS clock was another mistake but that turns out to have been there since 1974 going off stock photos I found.
Yes lots of things in that ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ2z1be2EXQ) are impossible with the UK teletext they're trying to emulate, generated by a Mullard SAA5050 (there were others). It also takes a whole character (for the control code) to switch foreground or background colours. The fonts and graphics pixel sizes are all over the place, the only 'pixel' art available used a 2x3 grid within each character..
I remember when TVs had special features regarding teletext, like some sort of page cache where you didn't need to wait for pages to load. Weirdly enough, contemporary TVs don't do this, despite memory and parallel processing power for this not being an issue. Or maybe I'm just remembering this as working better than it did…
If your TV/VCR had this and ShowView/VCR Plus, you were riding the knife edge of the future…
Being at a local, amateur radio station in Belgium in the 80's/90's we read some of our "news" or sports results from Teletekst. (Who were we fooling?) Being the amateurs we really were, half the time the page would flip while we were halfway through reading it on-air, with the cache not working or not loaded yet, and having to improvise your way out of it. I don't think anyone was really listening to these (former-)pirate stations by that time anymore, but it still was embarrassing. Oh, I am so nostalgic for those days...
They did, basically teletext iterated over pages so for one channel it was not that much data. I think teletext now is mvp feature that no one actually develops after it works most of the time. Thus worse user exeperience.
Many moons ago, when silicon clock speeds could be counted by man, I had written some software that looked innocent, that booted from floppy, that played a game, but really walked through the ROMs and EEPROMs plugged in to the BBC looking for anything of interest, and then would dump said ROMs, if they were not recognized as anything standard, to the floppy disk. "My little ROM reaper."
At a trade show I hopped around a few booths, showing off some of my work, putting the floppy disc into various Beebs, usually with the permission of the people who worked the booth (usually). Letting a random person run their software from floppy on your computer at a tradeshow? It was the fashion back in the day.
My software dumped those ROMs quietly as I worked my patter on the sales person. Even the British Army BBCs used for recruiting succumbed to my little ROM reaper. They didn't have anything of interest in them.
For reasons unknown, at one booth, my game crashed, and dumped out some text, "reaping ROMs...", and in my youthful bravado I brushed it off and worked some more patter. One of the onlookers was a sales person from another booth who was very technical, a hardware & software developer and I don't think my patter worked on him, but that person worked for Morley. We got to talking about what my software was _actually_ doing. Which lead to some work for me.
I played only a small part in this particular device. There were other devices of theirs I played a larger part in, i.e. the Beeb RAM disc peripheral, and their never released 10MB Winchester. Which still sits on a shelf in my office. Which I conveniently forgot to return. Also there were other accessories from other manufacturers I had a small hand in for the BBC; the Digigraph, a light pen, a mouse, a genlock (used quite literally by the BBC (BBC Wales)) and a robot arm to name a few.
> The main difference between this and some of the others is that it is tuned digitally via the BBC
You're welcome. I recall that one feature, and a few late bug fixes, were my sole contribution to that project.
That is so awesome! The digital tuner is extremely useful. I think the only thing I wish I could do with it is bung in the tuning hex code instead of seeking or loading from disk. But that is a minor niggle and it works really well :)
Also, that may be your sole contribution, but I suspect that work is the majority of the diff from Acorn's ATS. That and switching the I/O to I2C via the user port.
Very cool project. This hits two of my nostalgia vectors: 8-bit computers and teletext. I remember as a kid (growing up in The Netherlands), I could spend a lot of time typing in page numbers in teletext, waiting for the counter to reach the page and see what kind of information would come up. I guess it was like an early version of the internet for me. But more mysterious in a way because the page number didn’t hold any predictive information on what would come up.
The recently released ZX Spectrum NEXT, an upgrade to the veritable ZX Spectrum platform of the 80's, has contemporary new-school Teletext capabilities:
I'm yet to enable it on my ZXSpectrumNext yet (too much fun playing old - and NEW! - games) but its on my list for the next few weeks.
There is also a thriving BBS community based around the ZXSpectrumNext .. everything old is new again, and we seem to be at a point in the road where anachronistic computing may soon give rise to an entirely new user platform ..
I like what they have done with the NEXT, but unfortunately I have no nostalgia for ZX Spectrums, I grew up in a BBC Micro household. I do have a +2 in my collection here, but I rarely use it.
There are quite a few! On Android, you can grab the TextTV app (may also be on iOS) and get feeds that are still operating. I used it while in Iceland (RÚV) to correlate some weather data, and Germany seems to have quite a few feeds.
I originally found it when I was trying to start my own micro Teletext service in the US for the fun of it, but the project got set aside to make way for more pressing things (aka life). I really should get back to it...
Dutch Teletekst is very much alive online. https://nos.nl/teletekst the mobile version is quite popular: +1M downloads on the Google Play store. Somehow news here is faster than regular sites, especially live sports scores.
This should work fine on the composite output of the pi with no need for a modulator. At least here in Europe, where teletext is still very much a thing, it works from the external satellite receiver that’s connected this way.
It does, the first part of my post shows this on the TV. But for the BBC Micro I'd need to physically hack the Morley quite a bit to take composite input. I also have an Acorn Teletext Adapter, this can easily take composite instead of RF via a jumper.
I knew a guy who did that with a microcontroller and hung it on the wall in the office, before data dashboards (or Pis for that matter) were really a thing.
I think a Mode 7 dashboard would really focus the mind on what's absolutely essential.
That's because modern digital standards (DVB-T/DVB-C/DVB-S/DVB-S2) actually added a way to encapsulate teletext data in the MPEG-2 TS stream inbetween usual MPEG2/H.264 and MP2/AC3/AAC audio tracks. Quite fascinating really.
Edit: I use Teletext here when I actually meant the BBCs DVB version. We would still internally refer to it as Teletext.
I worked on the infrastructure for Teletext at the BBC as late as 2018. We were charged with modernising the infrastructure for it so that in the future it'd be easier to deploy, and easier to Debug and modify in the future.
As far as I know the service that ran Teletext is still running to this day. The Carousel still gets sent out. I know there was discussion of killing off the data service, but I'm not sure if this ever actually got killed.
It should be noted that the Ceefax and Teletext of the 90s was replaced with a much more modern "Red Button" that ran into the 2000s. If Red Button still runs today, which by all accounts it might, it'll look vastly different than in this article. Much more like the following: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/22/BBC_Red_Butto... - Some of the mechanisms (Carousels, etc) are similar.
Regardless of whether or not it did this application will still be running. The Teletext infrastructure was used to also send out things like "Watch on iPlayer" for Internet Connected TVs that were not currently connected to the internet. It formed an important part of the marketing for HBBTV, of which the BBC helped form the standard.
I only worked on this project for 6 months, but it was one of the most interesting projects I have worked on. It was myself and another developer, and it was completed and deployed. A lot of code I wrote now sends out these packets to millions of homes in the UK.
Having to learn the low-level packet structure of DSMCC, and being able to efficiently pack these and send them out to multiple broadcast towers was incredible.
I will say this. One of the big discussions from our team during this time was how poor a decision it would be to turn off the Data Service. The costs of this service are negligible. It is very efficiently ran. The broadcasting towers are needed for other services, and it is a single Java Application, and some hosted services that, again, are ran for other purposes too.
However, for a lot of our more elderly users, this was a way to get them good quality news without having them rely on things like the Daily Mail. It served a public good, regardless of how little it was used. It is a one way service, a carousel of data, so we did not have good metrics on it's use.
It was to try to encourage users to move to Hbbtv, which of course someone like my Grandma would never move to.
Your comment really triggered a trip down memory lane for me. I also remembered how crazy it is that we used to go and choose vacations out of paper catalogues at the travel agent.
I also remember reading the football results for my dad on my grandparents teletext on Saturday afternoon so he could check them against his pools picks. Strangely prominent piece of tech in my childhood.
I did a not nearly as cool project several years ago, a command line NOS Teletekst reader for Unix/Windows. Might be of use to someone: https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt
[+] [-] lqet|2 years ago|reply
It's still going strong here in Germany. The Teletext service run by ARD alone still had 19 M users 2 years ago [0]. You can even use it in a browser [1]. My father uses it heavily and with split-screen to get up-to-date sports results and news without all the BS he has to deal with on the internet as someone over 60 (notifications, cookie warnings, usability changes every 6 months, fear of accidentally "clicking somewhere dangerous", ads). I suspect he uses Teletext for the same reasons I visit HN for.
Somewhat ironically, his Teletext (his TV signal) has been delivered via Internet for over a decade now.
[0] https://www.rbb-online.de/unternehmen/der_rbb/rbb_in_der_ard....
[1] https://www.ard-text.de/
[+] [-] jeroenhd|2 years ago|reply
Not only is Teletext still used very often, the public broadcaster is also legally obligated to have Teletext, and for aviators the law specifies Teletext as one of three legal options for pilots to check the weather on when preparing for a flights.
The Dutch news site tweakers wrote a small piece about this upgrade last week (use your favourite translation tool): https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...
[+] [-] paulcapewell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxJedi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scoot|2 years ago|reply
Interestingly an intern at a telecoms research company where I worked in IT was tasked with using an OTA teletext receiver to convert teletext to web circa 1995/96.
I don't recall the details about it, other than that he got it working, after reverse engineering the (serial?) protocol the supplied software used. But nothing ever became of that project as far as I know.
[+] [-] gpvos|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sverhagen|2 years ago|reply
> Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext.
I read this article from four days ago (link below, it's in Dutch) about how the Dutch broadcasting had recently made a significant investment to upgrade the old system, which was running on a local Windows 2003 machine/server, to a cloud-based solution that integrates with their other content-management system(s). It surprised me how many people still use this system. From the article: "the service still reaches a few million people per week through TV screens, and another 800,000 daily users via its app". (For reference, population of the Netherlands is 18 million.)
https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...
[+] [-] actionfromafar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|2 years ago|reply
It all ran on a couple of SGI Challenge-S servers, these were basically re-packaged Indy's.
If you've been on the net that long you may also remember the original nu.nl which was utterly barebones and blistering fast. No ads, no eye candy, no opinions or comments, just the AP feed.
[+] [-] anonzzzies|2 years ago|reply
I know quite a lot of people in NL, some under 50, who prefer teletext to other forms of news and use it all the time.
[+] [-] pjmlp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxJedi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zimpenfish|2 years ago|reply
I did think the HH:MM/SS clock was another mistake but that turns out to have been there since 1974 going off stock photos I found.
[+] [-] glxxyz|2 years ago|reply
If they wanted a more faithful font there are plenty around, I've even done a couple myself: https://github.com/glxxyz/bedstead and https://galax.xyz/TELETEXT/
[+] [-] mhd|2 years ago|reply
If your TV/VCR had this and ShowView/VCR Plus, you were riding the knife edge of the future…
[+] [-] jonatron|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sverhagen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxJedi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinlloyd|2 years ago|reply
At a trade show I hopped around a few booths, showing off some of my work, putting the floppy disc into various Beebs, usually with the permission of the people who worked the booth (usually). Letting a random person run their software from floppy on your computer at a tradeshow? It was the fashion back in the day.
My software dumped those ROMs quietly as I worked my patter on the sales person. Even the British Army BBCs used for recruiting succumbed to my little ROM reaper. They didn't have anything of interest in them.
For reasons unknown, at one booth, my game crashed, and dumped out some text, "reaping ROMs...", and in my youthful bravado I brushed it off and worked some more patter. One of the onlookers was a sales person from another booth who was very technical, a hardware & software developer and I don't think my patter worked on him, but that person worked for Morley. We got to talking about what my software was _actually_ doing. Which lead to some work for me.
I played only a small part in this particular device. There were other devices of theirs I played a larger part in, i.e. the Beeb RAM disc peripheral, and their never released 10MB Winchester. Which still sits on a shelf in my office. Which I conveniently forgot to return. Also there were other accessories from other manufacturers I had a small hand in for the BBC; the Digigraph, a light pen, a mouse, a genlock (used quite literally by the BBC (BBC Wales)) and a robot arm to name a few.
> The main difference between this and some of the others is that it is tuned digitally via the BBC
You're welcome. I recall that one feature, and a few late bug fixes, were my sole contribution to that project.
[+] [-] LinuxJedi|2 years ago|reply
Also, that may be your sole contribution, but I suspect that work is the majority of the diff from Acorn's ATS. That and switching the I/O to I2C via the user port.
[+] [-] wkjagt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnarn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo8551|2 years ago|reply
I particularly liked on called bamboozle if I recall. It was a kind of quiz game.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply
I also booked a holiday from Teletext. It shows you the prices then you call to book.
[+] [-] boffinAudio|2 years ago|reply
https://dashboard.nxtel.org/Help/Topic/FAQ
I'm yet to enable it on my ZXSpectrumNext yet (too much fun playing old - and NEW! - games) but its on my list for the next few weeks.
There is also a thriving BBS community based around the ZXSpectrumNext .. everything old is new again, and we seem to be at a point in the road where anachronistic computing may soon give rise to an entirely new user platform ..
[+] [-] LinuxJedi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkaku|2 years ago|reply
Very good read.
[+] [-] 0xEF|2 years ago|reply
I originally found it when I was trying to start my own micro Teletext service in the US for the fun of it, but the project got set aside to make way for more pressing things (aka life). I really should get back to it...
[+] [-] jansenmac|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forinti|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempaccount1234|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxJedi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flir|2 years ago|reply
I think a Mode 7 dashboard would really focus the mind on what's absolutely essential.
[+] [-] izacus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PodgieTar|2 years ago|reply
I worked on the infrastructure for Teletext at the BBC as late as 2018. We were charged with modernising the infrastructure for it so that in the future it'd be easier to deploy, and easier to Debug and modify in the future.
As far as I know the service that ran Teletext is still running to this day. The Carousel still gets sent out. I know there was discussion of killing off the data service, but I'm not sure if this ever actually got killed.
It should be noted that the Ceefax and Teletext of the 90s was replaced with a much more modern "Red Button" that ran into the 2000s. If Red Button still runs today, which by all accounts it might, it'll look vastly different than in this article. Much more like the following: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/22/BBC_Red_Butto... - Some of the mechanisms (Carousels, etc) are similar.
Regardless of whether or not it did this application will still be running. The Teletext infrastructure was used to also send out things like "Watch on iPlayer" for Internet Connected TVs that were not currently connected to the internet. It formed an important part of the marketing for HBBTV, of which the BBC helped form the standard.
I only worked on this project for 6 months, but it was one of the most interesting projects I have worked on. It was myself and another developer, and it was completed and deployed. A lot of code I wrote now sends out these packets to millions of homes in the UK.
Having to learn the low-level packet structure of DSMCC, and being able to efficiently pack these and send them out to multiple broadcast towers was incredible.
I will say this. One of the big discussions from our team during this time was how poor a decision it would be to turn off the Data Service. The costs of this service are negligible. It is very efficiently ran. The broadcasting towers are needed for other services, and it is a single Java Application, and some hosted services that, again, are ran for other purposes too.
However, for a lot of our more elderly users, this was a way to get them good quality news without having them rely on things like the Daily Mail. It served a public good, regardless of how little it was used. It is a one way service, a carousel of data, so we did not have good metrics on it's use.
It was to try to encourage users to move to Hbbtv, which of course someone like my Grandma would never move to.
If you're interesting in learning more about how Teletext works I used this resource extensively during my time at the BBC. https://www.tvwithoutborders.com/tutorials/dtv_intro/how-to-...
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] landgenoot|2 years ago|reply
She knows what teletext is, but her mind was blown when I explained what the colored buttons on every TV remote are meant for.
[+] [-] LinuxJedi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _joel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jebarker|2 years ago|reply
I also remember reading the football results for my dad on my grandparents teletext on Saturday afternoon so he could check them against his pools picks. Strangely prominent piece of tech in my childhood.
[+] [-] sjmulder|2 years ago|reply
I did a not nearly as cool project several years ago, a command line NOS Teletekst reader for Unix/Windows. Might be of use to someone: https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt
[+] [-] ochrist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmet|2 years ago|reply