Teletext News RIP

[MPwannadecentincome]

Teletext news on telly was to be turned off in Jan 2010 - 2 years ahead of schedule, but apparently they already killed it off yesterday.

[NickFitz]

My first programming job involved writing software in Forth for Teletext transmission systems.

The Teletext Level 1 spec (lacking its diagrams) is at archive.org, or there's Word and Postscript versions at Imperial College. Who could fail to be moved by such classic lines as:

The bit signalling rate is 6.9375 Mbits/s (±25 parts per million). It is 444 times the nominal television line frequency.

or:

The fourth and fifth Byte of every Data-Line, and a further eight Bytes of the Page-Header Data Lines, are Hamming Codes containing four 'message' bits as listed in table 1a. The bits are transmitted in numerical order from b1 to b8.

[thunderlizard]

Anybody care to predict the turn-off date of The Internet (as we know it)?

[RichardCranium]

Anybody care to predict the turn-off date of The Internet (as we know it)?

The digital one or the analogue one?

[Doggy Styles]

I worked on the software for Prestel, which was identical presentation technology. State of the art for the masses before the interweb got going. I say masses, but not many people had it.

The marketing for the Italian version at the time said that porn was the most popular usage, but I never figured out how that worked on a 40x25 character-based screen. Perhaps that's why they've turned off teletext.

[RichardCranium]

The marketing for the Italian version at the time said that porn was the most popular usage, but I never figured out how that worked on a 40x25 character-based screen.

You never downloaded & viewed porn on a CGA monitor, then? All it took was a bit of imagination.

[NickFitz]

You never downloaded & viewed porn on a CGA monitor, then? All it took was a bit of imagination.

CGA was 320*200 in four colour mode and 640*200 monochrome, which is obviously somewhat better than the Teletext/Prestel 80*72 graphics.

Then again, we had test data including some really cool pages from a Californian cable station which had a designer who had become a whizz with Teletext graphics - a particularly good picture of an elephant sticks in the mind

Level 5 Teletext allowed for high quality graphics, but I don't think it was ever implemented outside the lab. The equivalent spec for Prestel was trialled as Picture Prestel: the company I worked at created the transmission systems and editing terminals for that. The editing system used a Torch (basically a reboxed BBC Micro with a Z80 second processor hanging off The Tube) with a custom decoder card attached.