This was the internet before the internet existed. I know that years ago on the ITV version of this which has long since gone there was a jobfinder service which people would look for jobs in the local area. I believe the first "online" shopping was done with a system similar to this by a woman called Mrs Snowball back in 1984 as she had a modified tv so she could get her shopping to her house. Amazing to think that this this lasted for about 40 odd years. Thanks for uploading this and I remember the creepy music that used to be played whilst this was on
This is possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen. It is like read only internet sent over analog signals. This is amazing, it existed in the 1970s? I knew radio stations send lines of text in packets over FM that contain the ID3/CD-Text data for artist and song name, but not TV stations sending text based news. I want to learn how this works, and build a modulator that I will test on a old CRT for fun. Hmmmm... I wonder what the average bitrate was.
Hey, maybe I can help you. I work at a local television station in the Netherlands. Here we use this system: teletekst.alphenstadfm.nl/EXEC from PHECAP. It's possible to download this software www.phecap.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5&Itemid=6&lang=en (I think it's for free), maybe you need more hardware, I don't know. But don't you have teletext in your country? Here, every single TV station has teletext. PS: Why would you test teletext on an old CRT? Doesn't every television support teletext?
wiebenik2 I actually have no idea, but I have a old CRT that works in the US and UK. I know that Gemstar TVGuide+ used a proprietary implementation. There is metadata sent with the TV and rating. but now with digital I have no idea if it still exists in the US. That has been dead for a few years. Wikipedia mentioned a discontinuation of World Teletext System in the 1990s because captioning decoders were cheaper and mroe common. Said it was completely cut off in 1993. Im pretty sure standard teletext is discontinued because of this quote: "NABTS, a version of the European teletext standard designed to work with the NTSC television standard used in North America was first demonstrated in the USA in 1978. Station KSL in Salt Lake City, Utah, premiered a teletext service using Ceefax. They were followed by American television network CBS, which carried out preliminary tests on both the British Teletext and the rival French Antiope system.[3][4] One of the most prominent providers was the Electra teletext service, using WST, broadcast from the early 1980s and 1990s until 1993 on American cable channel WTBS. Despite this, the system never caught on in the USA partly due to EIA-608 being deployed for captioning before Teletext was introduced and the higher cost of Teletext receivers. In the 1980s a similar system called Telidon was developed in Canada by the Department of Communications. It used a simple graphics language that would allow a more complex circuit in the TV to decode not only characters, but graphics as well. To do this, the graphic was encoded as a series of instructions (graphics primitives) like "polyline" which was represented as the characters PL followed by a string of digits for the X and Y values of the points on the line. This system was referred to as PDI (Picture Description Instructions). Later improved versions of Telidon were developed into NAPLPS. Although there were numerous attempts to introduce NAPLPS services in North America, none of these was successful and eventually shut down. A number of special-purpose systems lived on for some time, similar to Prestel's lingering death, but the widespread rollout of internet access in the 1990s ended these efforts." I believe the software you mentioned is what I need, I do have the hardware necessary to output a analog signal. I have something similar to a capture card but it works in reverse. I managed to output captioning and rating info but nothing else so far.
They used to transmit 'pages from Ceefax' (or sometimes it alternated with the BBC test card) at times on BBC2 when there was nothing on. Accompanied by cheesy elevator music played in the background
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this concept. Lol. I've never hear of this type of service before. Was anything like this ever offered here in the United States?
Yes, but it never really caught on. A similar standard was still used to transmit ratings and captions until the digital switch though. In my above comment, I mentioned a quote from Wikipedia. Here it is again: "NABTS, a version of the European teletext standard designed to work with the NTSC television standard used in North America was first demonstrated in the USA in 1978. Station KSL in Salt Lake City, Utah, premiered a teletext service using Ceefax. They were followed by American television network CBS, which carried out preliminary tests on both the British Teletext and the rival French Antiope system.[3][4] One of the most prominent providers was the Electra teletext service, using WST, broadcast from the early 1980s and 1990s until 1993 on American cable channel WTBS. Despite this, the system never caught on in the USA partly due to EIA-608 being deployed for captioning before Teletext was introduced and the higher cost of Teletext receivers. In the 1980s a similar system called Telidon was developed in Canada by the Department of Communications. It used a simple graphics language that would allow a more complex circuit in the TV to decode not only characters, but graphics as well. To do this, the graphic was encoded as a series of instructions (graphics primitives) like "polyline" which was represented as the characters PL followed by a string of digits for the X and Y values of the points on the line. This system was referred to as PDI (Picture Description Instructions). Later improved versions of Telidon were developed into NAPLPS. Although there were numerous attempts to introduce NAPLPS services in North America, none of these was successful and eventually shut down. A number of special-purpose systems lived on for some time, similar to Prestel's lingering death, but the widespread rollout of internet access in the 1990s ended these efforts." According to ElvisRockVinyl below, recording to a VHS saved the Teletext info along with the video. Pretty interesting.
+SHAUNA TATE This was part of the PAL Analogue tv system used in Europe and many other places. If you are from North America, the NTSC decided to drop this service, even though they did test it out. I am from Europe and we pretty much got all our news in an instant. This was to us what internet is to us now. When I moved to North America, I missed this service a lot.
