Ceefax

[VectraMan]

The death of Ceefax was on the news this morning, but what they didn't say was that the final remaining analogue signal in Northern Ireland is being switched off tonight, which obviously is what Ceefax uses.

So the fact they've switched Ceefax off is only relevant to the people of Northern Ireland, who still watch analogue, and who wanted to watch Ceefax today. The rest of us haven't had it for some time (since September 2011 for me), and probably never noticed.

I do remember Prestel. I even saw it once.

 

[minestrone]

Do you think that they keep an archive of the pages?

It would be good to go to a site and enter a date and be presented with the pages from that moment.

 

[NickFitz]

I worked on Prestel, does anyone remember it? A sort of pay-as-you-go version of Ceefax.

Yep, BT's over-the-wire videotex service. Never really took off with consumers, but revolutionised the travel agency industry until the arrival of the web.

My first job after Uni was as a systems software engineer for the leading producer of Teletext and Prestel systems in the world - not the receivers, but the transmission systems. 1984 was a heady time for the Teletext transmission industry, as we were just starting to make boards built around the 8086, supplanting the 6809-based kit that had been the mainstay for a number of years. All the embedded control software was still written in Forth though

The company also invented the systems used for information displays at railway stations and airports. The big innovation there was full frame Teletext: the network was just UHF coax, with a Teletext decoder built into the monitors, and as there wasn't any picture on the signal the Teletext data could occupy the whole field (minus the vertical blanking interval), giving much higher bandwidth than on a TV station.

Then there was videotex level 5, the counterpart of Teletext level 5 (the implementations we're now mourning were only level 1), which had sufficiently advanced colour graphics that BT marketed it as Picture Prestel. Our test implementation was over in a corner running on a Torch (a rebadged BBC Micro), displaying a digitised photograph in all its refulgent splendour.

Going back to the travel agents: in 2000 I was working on a website for West Midlands Co-op Travel, offering late availability deals. The database of said deals was provided by a company from Cwmbran, who in fact provided data to just about all UK travel agency sites at that time. I went to visit them once and they showed me the source of all their powers: a room filled with Prestel terminals, automated to go through all the late deal holiday pages and screenscrape the data to feed their database

If you fancy reading the original Level 1 Teletext spec, a scan of it is available from the Wayback Machine as a PostScript file (Macs, at least, can read that without any additional software) or just as HTML, which is more legible but doesn't have that 1970s tech spec typographic feel. I remember reading through that several times (on paper) and trying to get my head round the way Hamming codes worked.

Bye bye Teletext

 

[SupremeSpod]

Anybody else here remember the Duke of Edinburgh's PRESTEL account getting hijacked?

 

[BA to the Stars]

Anybody else here remember the Duke of Edinburgh's PRESTEL account getting hijacked?

That wasn't you was it?

 

[VectraMan]

The company also invented the systems used for information displays at railway stations and airports. The big innovation there was full frame Teletext: the network was just UHF coax, with a Teletext decoder built into the monitors, and as there wasn't any picture on the signal the Teletext data could occupy the whole field (minus the vertical blanking interval), giving much higher bandwidth than on a TV station.

Then there was videotex level 5, the counterpart of Teletext level 5 (the implementations we're now mourning were only level 1), which had sufficiently advanced colour graphics that BT marketed it as Picture Prestel. Our test implementation was over in a corner running on a Torch (a rebadged BBC Micro), displaying a digitised photograph in all its refulgent splendour.

Is it true that until compartively recently, stations were still running an information system based on the BBC Micro?

I had a Tatung Einstein, that had the same 40x25 teletext mode as the Beeb. The thing I remember is the first two characters of each line were always wasted as you had to use them for the control codes to set foreground and background colours.

 

[NickFitz]

Is it true that until compartively recently, stations were still running an information system based on the BBC Micro?

No, that was BT's prototype Picture Prestel box. It had a few custom boards hanging off the bus.

The Teletext systems were built in-house; primarily 6809-based, and later 8086. They also sold their processor boards to other companies wanting microprocessor-based systems for use as industrial controllers. The Teletext-specific hardware (the Channel Insertion Unit, or CIU) was on a separate board.

I had a Tatung Einstein, that had the same 40x25 teletext mode as the Beeb. The thing I remember is the first two characters of each line were always wasted as you had to use them for the control codes to set foreground and background colours.

Yep, and control codes for switching to "graphics" mode and changing colour and so forth, which makes this collection of Teletext porn even more impressive

 

[darmstadt]

Still seems to be strong here, they even advertise it on TV!

 

[d000hg]

It's OK, you can still get your CEEFAX fix. Just visit any website that employs those dreadful kreatif developer/designer types that imagine you require a special needs version of their website on your fully-functional 2012 smart phone. You'll find yourself immersed in HUGE PRINT, un-zoomable, graphics-light content before you know it.

The 'best' ones don't even hide a link way down at the bottom of their page any more to get to the main site in the hope you'll miss it and revel in their genius. Too many people have found that link now, and so they just drop you into the design travesty that is their mobile version whether you want it or not. Even when the "full site" link does exist, they also haven't heard of cookies (which weren't invented in 1978, where they take their inspiration from), and so repeatedly catapult you back into their crappy 'mobile' version, even after you've told them you want the full site repeatedly.

Their crapfest is also available on most Android tablets, using which seems indistinguishable to them from a request to view the ZX Spectrum version of their site. So......goodbye CEEFAX, hello MOBILE.

Can you name and shame a few examples? I've seen sites that force you to the mobile version but none that then suffer the ugliness issues you talk about.

BTW if you use an offline browser such as used by Opera-mobile, Amazon and the new Nokia Xpress beta where the page is rendered (or maybe just pre-processed I'm not sure) on the server, what happens? I might test a couple of sites on my Lumia to compare IE9 and Xpress if you can suggest examples.

 

[KentPhilip]

Yep, and control codes for switching to "graphics" mode and changing colour and so forth, which makes this collection of Teletext porn even more impressive

haha yes I've seen that. Unfortunately they kept me away from it until after I'd left the company..

That was on Channel 4, not ITV

Yes I stand corrected. Teletext for both channels was produced by the same company.

My first job after Uni was as a systems software engineer for the leading producer of Teletext and Prestel systems in the world - not the receivers, but the transmission systems.

Was that Vortex inserters? Running on VAX/VMS.
I worked for the company that replaced this technology with windows-based code around 1999, for ITV and C4.

The company also invented the systems used for information displays at railway stations and airports.

Going back to the travel agents: in 2000 I was working on a website for West Midlands Co-op Travel, offering late availability deals. The database of said deals was provided by a company from Cwmbran, who in fact provided data to just about all UK travel agency sites at that time. I went to visit them once and they showed me the source of all their powers: a room filled with Prestel terminals, automated to go through all the late deal holiday pages and screenscrape the data to feed their database

Holy cow.
If only they'd told me at the time, and I could have provided them with a URL carrying screenshots of every page at the time..