Want to kmow the weather, lottery results, TV channel program for the day and other info? Go to your TV and check the teletext
I remember being an avid browser of the TV Guide to plan out things I’d want to watch for the week.
Wow, I’d somehow never heard of teletext. What country did you use that in?
Not the person you asked, but it was very popular in the UK. You could get news, sport, programme times, recipes, reviews, games, holidays and all sorts. With no on demand TV it was often more interesting than what was currently being broadcast. It was also the basis for displaying subtitles over TV.
At the time I think in most western Europe teletext was a thing. Imagine you had this menu on the TV with pages that have graphics of the Atari 2600, and you access by inserting 3 digits codes on the page, seeks the page for you, and presents what’s in there. This was, in a nutshell, teletext
I actually saw a recording of a news story about that recently. It was about when BBC’s Ceefax shut down 12 years ago.
It was interesting because I’d never hear of something like that before. I guess the technology wasn’t too big in the US.
Want to book a holiday? Teletext. Want to play a daily quiz? Teletext. Want to check live football scores? Teletext.
At some point much later teletext even go a chat function. Was with SMS, extremely expensive.Soome people went ham on the relationships zone (and at some point there was also a 18+ zone for dirty talk during the night)
The data for the pages was contained in the “flyback”; each dot of each frame of your normal TV programme image started at the top left of the screen, moved to the right and then flew back to the left, one line down until you had a screen’s-worth. The flyback was fast so as to get a full screen image in whatever the frame rate was (30Hz?) Originally the flyback was just wasted bandwidth: a necessary loss whilst your TV moved it’s electron beam back to the left hand side. But because the flyback was fast, you’d never be able to get a full ‘proper’ image in there; that’s why teletext was text and primitive block graphics. And why you’d have to wait several minutes to see the page you wanted on a trend page cycle!
