1975: CEEFAX - A Communications REVOLUTION? | This Is Ceefax | Retro Tech | BBC Archive 

I was still using CEEFAX into the 2000s for news, sport, weather and TV listings. I had no idea, being born in 85, that it was created so far back. What a great invention it was.

Heard that when Ceefax first came out it was the fastest way to find out Footy scores that weren't broadcast, so you'd have people sitting staring at the TV wearing full club colours with a rattle just waiting for a number to change so they could cheer or boo.

Utterly brilliant to be able to watch these in 2022. What an amazing world we've built for ourselves to enjoy. Be excellent to eachother!

The keyboard on that Ceefax terminal at 3:10 is epic (both sight and sound). Back from when things were built to last. I can just imagine the tactile goodness of those keys!

Looks promising! Hope they make it available in the states.

I miss teletext! Total nostalgia rush, anyone remember bamboozled?! :)

In the 50s, 60s and 70s and even into the 80s the BBC was an absolute powerhouse of innovation

Used this quite often if I missed the lottery, wanted to know what was going on, breaking news, school updates, bad weather and anything else. You could say, it was the early Google.

I remember having a sleepover at a friends house in the 80s, to me his family was pretty well off, he had a tv with Ceefax, he showed me and I was instantly hooked, I had heard of it but my family never had a tv that had it, I spent ages on the thing till we had to go to bed, I even think at one point he got a bit fed up of me messing with it lol

My favourite feature of Ceefax was that there were certain pages that could be read by a BBC B computer as code and it would basically download code into memory to run a program. These were obviously very basic but it was a very early way of downloading a program or game you could then save to tape/disk and run later.

Angela Ripon has pirate bay on the tv 8:58 🤣

Ceefax was such a good well-funded service up to 1997 or so. It was where news junkies first went to for up to the minute international headlines. With the start of BBC News 24 and online services, you had the feeling, even in the late 90's, that terrestrial TV was no longer the priority it once was.

They shot that on my brother's fifth birthday! He looks very different now of course, but it was odd how Ceefax never changed throughout its existence.

Teletekst is still alive and well in the Netherlands. Apart from via tv it is also available online. Football fans use it a lot as a lot of European leagues are covered on teletext. Apparently Turkish football fans use Dutch teletext to make screenshot of their league table and then make a tweet of that.

7:50 This astonished me. As a kid I was used to watching Ceefax pages during downtime between programmes, but I always thought it was more computer-controlled than this (perhaps it was, later on). I never dreamed that anyone would actually have to sit and create those graphical block-based fonts BY HAND!

Opening shot, that mansion house, that's Kingswood Warren. "Wherever you are in the world, the chances are that at least some of the technology in your living room started life in this sprawling gothic mansion house in deepest darkest Surrey. HDTV, Nicam digital stereo Teletext and international standards for digital television were all developed at Kingswood Warren, home to the BBC's team of broadcast technologists since the 1940s."

I loved CEEFAX. It was my goto place for news in the 80’s and 90’s. In fact, it was how I found out about Diana’s death, so it will always be burned into my memory as part of that day. A wonderful system invented by boffins who realised how spare lines could contain data. Clever folks back then!

Teletext still exists. The European DVB standard for digital television is able to incorporate teletext pages compatible with the old format. Most modern televisions can decode it, and digital set top boxes have a feature called "teletext insertion" which transforms digital teletext into the old format so old analogue tv sets can decode it. Apparently BBC and ITV abolished teletext when they went digital, but technically there was no need to, and many European stations still have it.

The most dated (but also nostalgic) part of this report was that shot of Woolworths in the background!

My Uncle and Aunt had a TV with ceefax in the early 80’s, it was ground breaking!

My dad used to use Ceefax quite a bit back in the day. Brings back memories seeing this.

Anyone of a certain age will remember waiting for the latest football scores to update every time the page (131 I think!) came around every cycle.

Used to love Ceefax as a kid. Felt really high-tech! Weirdly, it was May 7th when they filmed this according to his page display, the same date I am watching this! Spooky!! 😀

american teen here. i wish teletext made it here into the states and i wish it still existed. it looks so useful, even in the modern world

Page 152, Bamboozle! Brilliant game, used to play it before going to school in the mornings.

Some extra info not many people know. The index page numbers were actually hexadecimal, but only digits 0-9 were primarily used making it BCD. However, the extra digits A-F were used for OOB information pages not accessible with a regular TV set and remote. You could access some of them by using the i (information/index) button on the remote control on particular pages which would shunt you to a hidden page.

Ceefax was my internet, before the internet!

When I watch archive tech news, yes I smile at the limitations they had, however I am amazed at the planning/forethought for the connected world we live in now.

God, I'm 28 and I feel old. I remember us using Teletext for the lottery results, the weather and cinema times.

We need a petition to bring back Ceefax. I miss it 🤧😭

Fascinating to see that this dated back to 1975! By the 80's our family had a TV with teletext built in, but the experimental system in the mid-70's was virtually identical to what we ended up having in our home. Great to see the guy at 7:14 creating large fonts in real time using teletext graphics (Vintage computer nerds will remember that the BBC Microcomputer in the early 80's had double-height fonts in Mode 7 that saved you having to do this). I wonder if any footage exists of people creating TELETEXT ART? Some of the pictures and cartoons were mind-blowing for the time!

Putting 888 on the TV even though you didn’t need to!

These were the good old days. I remember Ceefax & Teletext. I used to love all that to keep an eye on the football scores & latest breaking news way back before all this social media nonsense. Can't believe it was invented that far back. A brilliant invention

Haha! In my younger days when ceefax was still a thing, we used to refer to it as 'The Cornish internet'!

And the beautiful Angela Rippon, as well! I'm surprised my Dad hasn't popped back from his cloud for a quick gander! 😉

This was my birth year! I always find it fascinating to see what was going on at that time.

Great little clip ..Ahhh the good ole days of ceefax, used to be on ceefax all the time for tv guide, sports news etc.. Absolutely loved it & would prefer to still have that now than the news technology we have nowdays 😁👍❤🇬🇧💯 X

OMFG, the OPTIMISM for a TV screen's possibilities shown at the end of this video! If ONLY that presenter knew THEN!!!

I was fascinated by Ceefax and Teletex when I was younger. I was really pleased when we got a TV with teletext capability in late 1989.

That "television monitor" looks suspiciously like our trusty Sony 13" colour TV which served our family for many years...

My Granny had the latest TV's at her GuestHouse. I spent my youth flipping through the CEEFAX pages in the 70's and 80's.

What a great service this was, anyone play Bamboozle on Channel 4? or read the best games magazine that ever was... Digitiser

I still used it till a few months ago before I cancelled my cable subscription. I loved the simplicity of it.

Press ‘Reveal’. Remember that?

In the early 80’s, I had a video recorder which captured quite a lot of the Ceefax data broadcast along with the programmes we were recording, and so we were able to ‘replay’ maybe up to 40% of the content, decades later on a much newer video recorder / TV.

Little known fact (well to those outside the UK): Television in the UK didn't become 24 hour until about 1988! Before then all the channels would switch off for the night - usually at different times....but all within a hour of each other. So say you wanted to watch a programme at 3am before 1988, you would go through channels and see a blank screen...either with a 'shooshy' noise or a single tone sound. Strange to us now, but this was what it was like before 24 hour TV!! BBC 1 shutdown at around 1am. There would be a rotating globe on the screen - with a clock overlaid on top of it. An announcer with a posh, clipped accent would announce that the station was closing for the night, and end with an endearing "Good night from the BBC". It really was another world then!!

Ceefax/Oracle were awesome. Digital text on Freeview seems far more sluggish in my experience...

That woman at the end waxing at the SEVERELY LIMITED possibilities of Teletext back then... she must've had her MIND BLOWN when the WWW came out in 1992!

2:40 I am now telling the computer *exactly* what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate!

Wow almost 50yrs ago!! now we get "ceefax" on our hand sized phones

Marvellous footage . The headline at 6.25 is a fascinating insight to international events. plus CEEFAX was a brilliant resource for checking Heathrow arrival times if collecting passengers.

I regularly used Ceefax from the 80's up until the early 00's. Loved this clip, especially @6:40 mins when Toni Arthur appeared. She was my earliest crush.

I used to stay up late as a kid to sit through Ceefax and Teletext on our old ITT television set and listen to the accompanying jazz

I seem to remember seeing live football scores in a ‘Newsflash’ box. Does anyone else remember that?

Very enjoyable to watch. By the time we got a teletext TV there were a lot more pages available e.g. Page 102 had become a news index where each item had its own page. A personal favourite was page 191 "Cat Calls", a daily joke which was always a cat related pun! I still use its successor on the red button, although I believe the BBC have proposed to withdraw the service.

I was definitely using this in the early 2000s I can remember when I got my first job I would come home and check the horse racing results. It was great to see flight arrivals and the weather local and in checking it daily before you would go on holiday. Loved playing bamboozle on C4 teletext and can remember my dad got a few holidays on it as well.

Better than lots of websites today, let's face it!!

10:08 "Spring in Southend (adults only horror film with Billy Bonds and an all-star cast)"!!!! Now THAT would have been something to see!

That mansion would have had a loading dock for pipe tobacco shipments, British boffins of yesteryear went through tonnes of the stuff weekly while innovating. Lead engineers would often have assistants who were employed to hold their pipe any time they needed to speak and gesticulate with both hands.

I loved in the 80's when they introduced subtitles on a few programs. I used punch up the subs on a prog with no subs, resulting in the screen appearing to show the prog, but still be in Ceefax/Teletext when my Dad tried, very unsuccessfully, to change channel. Also loved in this video, the huge box, helpfully labelled remote control.

I didn't realise Ceefax was so old! It even predated ARPANET (the communication network that was expanded to become the Internet!). I wonder how much Ceefax and Oracle influenced Sir Tim Berners Lee in the development of the World Wide Web?

Choosing a holiday using CEEFAX was great. I had a mate who happily watched the Windies play cricket over the same.

I used teletext on our TV set in Nigeria in 2004. Fascinating.

10:02 Can you imagine that..... in 1975😲

It is funny to think of a TV as a piece of furniture now.

even though i was ahead of the game to an extent i.e i was an early adopter of the Internet compared to it's mass adoption, i still used CEEFAX in the early 2000's. i'd use it to get a brief news headline overview, while eating breakfast, quicker to turn the TV on, then bother with the PC. It was also very handy for local cinema listings, just to see what's on.

Remember refreshing the racing pages constantly for my mum to get the horse & dog results. Great days.

What a tiny Tv!!! I used to use Ceefax and Oracle, mainly on my BBC Master, as you could download programs off it. Including games...

My source in the noughties...it was a handy feature that lasted quite well. It disappeared about 4 years ago if I believe, but apparently, it has been brought back to life recently

10:05 shocked me at first

It's funny to think that this man innocently making some words bold and in yellow to "give it a bit of interest" might be proto-clickbait.

I remember the first TV we had with teletext. I thought the future had arrived. Then I got a PC and ran a BBS and I thought the future had arrived. Then I got the internet and the future definitely had arrived. Then I got a cable modem and with it “always on internet” and I was sure the internet had finally arrived. Then I got a home automation system that ran with Alexa and oh my gosh it really WAS the future. I’m just wondering what the next big leap will be?

Angela Ripon's pins are a national treasure 🦵

I just checked the train timetables on ceefax - they are still on strike 😅

Wow! This was before any computers were mainstream! WOW!

That hilarious job of typing headlines off teleprinter printouts back into a computer...

Yet another Great British invention from the BBC and British boffins now forgotten and was revolutionary before the Internet, though should I mention Prestel?

used to like playing bamboozle on ch4

Amusing to think how Mr Biffo of the channel 4 videogames teletext page, Digitiser ended up using this to animate a ‘worm being sick’ towards the end of the teletext era.

I remember reading Digitiser on teletext! It was great.

So long ago yet feels like i was using this yesterday to read the latest football scores - 303…

Wow this is fab! 😂🎸🤘😎

Like video recorders if you had teletext then you were up to date. I used the text service more that my parents as they had no idea how to use it. One time I had turned on subtitles and had forgotten about it and went to bed. My parents had tried to watch some late night TV but had subtitles they couldn't turn off. I loved the music pages (mid 80's). My dad eventually learned how to use the service. He's 82 now and never off the internet. Banking, booking holidays. He has friends now everywhere.

We had this in Australia, It was called Teletext and was retired quite a few years ago.

Wow - this was filmed the month I was born.

They also made TVs that could print out Ceefax pages on to paper, PHILIPS 26CS3890/08R

In Italy it's still alive as teletext. Sunday afternoon football reunion it has been all about radio and telext. National lottery also is still displayed, and it is way more useful than the Internet these days too. Being Italy what it is, I know quite a few folks that don't have a computer, nor smartphone, but a tv set and an old school telephone line. So it was a Uk invention afterall!

Ceefax with subtitles for the blind… ingenious

I think we can all agree the best part was the chill music at night. Wait a minute!! The BBC invented lofi chill 10 hour videos omg!! xDDD

This seems very advanced for 1975. Must of seemed like magic at the time.

Loved playing the kids games on it

Was also very popular in Austria since 1980.

Not sure why he wanted to point out the Headlines graphic as it clearly says 'Heodlines'.

05:00 the memoriessssss

Great for the footie scores....

in Australia it was known as Teletext operated by channel seven

Wow she made a grand prediction at the end and was right 😎👍

As someone who grew up in the USA, I'm curious if they ever moved from being a set-top box to actually integrating the technology into TV sets like she said! This is such a unique piece of history!

5:25 And on the holiday pages, didn't we just love having to wait 25 minutes for page 4 of 39 to come back around again 🤣🤣

At 05:45 he said "here's a map of Great Britain" but why was Ireland included. Ireland is not part of Great Britain