1977: CEEFAX - The Dawn of INTERACTIVE TV | Pebble Mill | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
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- Опубликовано: 27 апр 2022
- "That is mind-boggling" - Bob Langley
David Seymour and Bob Langley take their first, tentative steps into a wider world, one rich with all manner of exciting possibilities - the wonderful world of modern television. No longer is watching television a largely passive experience, punctuated by the odd channel change. Television in 1977 is a thrillingly interactive medium; now you can browse thousands of pages of the latest news, sport, weather and more, thanks to the launch of Ceefax - the BBC's teletext service - or you can bring the experience of the arcade to your living room, courtesy of the Videomaster Home T.V. Game console.
What a time to be alive!
This clip is from Pebble Mill, originally broadcast 7 January, 1977.
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Развлечения
Yea!
Bamboozle on a Sunday afternoon!
Those were the days!
🤔
The annoying moment when you got a question wrong and you had to go back from the start!
Here's a little bit of trivia for you...
If you still have a VCR player/recorder, an older TV with teletext (ceefax) button on the remote and some video tapes (ones used for recording from TV, not ones with films on) and you have a tape you've recorded from live TV on BBC then if you are watching it back and press the Teletext/ceefax button you will see the ceefax pages for the day(s) that your tape was recorded.
So I've a video tape recorded on BBC on Christmas Day 1988 I think and it has the last part of the Queen's speech followed by Back to the Future, there's some other bits on there too like the news and an old episode of scooby doo on ITV, if I press the Teletext/ceefax button on my TV remote then it will display the ceefax/Teletext pages for the 25th December 1988.
What's more impressive is you can navigate around the ceefax, so press a combination of 3 numbers to get to a different page.
Pretty awesome.
That's insane. So the Teletext recorded to the tape?
@@davidjames579 yep, and it's navigatable. It's a bit patchy, like it doesn't return the full page, more like sections of the page but it's impressive none the less 😊
@@mred5625 Thanks. Yeah one of the other contributors say it the Teletext aspect was one part of the image, only viewable when Teletext is selected and the part of that TV switches to read it.
@@davidjames579 Teletext used a few of the picture lines which were normally off the top of the screen. If your TV was slightly out of alignment the lines could be seen as a series of white dots which were the digital code.
Apparently it works much better with SVHS. With standard VHS it was just about good enough to decipher the date and time in the header. Pages were a mess.
Wow!
I'm definitely going to purchase this.
It's incredible technology 👏🏼
It’s just mind boggling
i know, me too, i cant wait to get this for my telly!
Teletext became very popular here for a decade or so, most tv sets had it as standard. I remember it was great for booking last minute cheap holidays - even my tech averse father used that!. Myself, I liked the news and weather pages best and would tune in several times a day just for the BBC Ceefax and ITV Oracle teletext updates, and have fond memories of the crude 'art gallery' images they broadcast, especially the advent calender at xmas time.
Channel 4 even had a Teletext 'Soap' on theirs called Park Avenue, which I'm afraid to say I used to read daily to follow the exciting storyline.
I never realised until I watched this that the service needed a special box that cost nearly 400 quid. I mean 400 quid must have been an absolute fortune back then. By the time I came along it was already a free service that most TVs came with. I remember going to the kids' page and doing the quizzes and also there were video game tips.
@@goodlookinouthomie1757 £2,648 today
@@goodlookinouthomie1757 In a few years it was about £100 extra for a TV, 20% added cost. A lot of people rented then so it's wasn't a big initial outlay for a TV. I think people took a bit of persuading that it was something worth paying extra for but by the mid-80s it really took of, and by 1990 it was just about standard for main TVs.
What do you mean by last minute cheap holidays? I'm an American. Would the TV say like "Call now to get flights and a hotel to Spain" or something more local
Wanting to smash the remote when you missed pressing hold on the page you wanted...good old day`s.
Haha, I forgot about that. I remember trying to book a holiday and there were about 60 pages of travel agent deals. The one deal we wanted, we didn't manage to press hold in time to write down the phone number, so we had to sit through 59 pages (for about 10 minutes, but it felt like years) until it came back round again!
Then there was a mad rush to press the hold button before the page left the screen again! Ah, the good ol' days!!
@@diond1333 yeah 😂,waiting for the page to come back round was like watching paint dry
I still miss Teletext, i used to read the film and gaming pages late at night.
There's various implementations of it over shortwave radio. I watch the maritime weather charts and satellite images late at night.
I'm so glad I found this channel it's full of these nostalgic little gems 😭 lol I've been binge watching videos lol
Ceefax was available until Octobor 2012
4:22 "For £20 you can have hours and hours of entertainment." Simpler times; I remember them well. ;-)
That was £150 in todays money. What really puts it into context is how much the Ceefax box cost, £3000 in todays money 😳
@@fraggit Indeed.
Aye but filthy Susan is alot cheaper at £15
@@stash. Ah, but Dirty Gerty was well under 30, and you got green shield stamps, or was it Luncheon vouchers 🤔
I'm a fan of this BBC Archive. So nostalgic.
Used to use Ceefax for the latest football scores back in the 90s and to check what films were on if we didnt buy a newspaper that day. Good times!
The BBC Archive tech subjects are like the British version of The Computer Chronicles, but a decade earlier! This is fascinating!
I'm in my 30s and remember teletext. It was great for football results, no social media gossip it was fun
I'm 30 :) I used to love bamboozle and have happy memories playing the quiz game with my grandad.
Absolutely brilliant! I remember watching that very programme in my school dinner break
‘Press Reveal’
Incredible to think this was 45 years ago and this looks archaic compared to what we have now. How outdated will what we have today look in 45 years time?
That's exactly what I was thinking. Today's stuff boggles my mind and yet back then Ceefax boggled their mind. I was just born when that was shown. In 45 years what will we think of Tesla's now and our phones etc.? I'll have snuffed it by then probably but it does boggle the mind.
I used to watch that show with my Grandma…….time waits for no man as the old saying goes
I think in the near future 20-30 years, will be all about AR.
Everyone will be walking around with glasses that are constantly tapped into the internet.
We’ll see information floating above people’s heads. Advertising floating in the air all around us. Information above the door of every building. Important news updates flashing in your eyes. You’ll also be able to adjust some of the settings to what and how frequent you want to see these things. So it will be personal for each individual. Some apps will need to be paid for of course. We’ll be permanently plugged. And if you’re not, you’ll have a severe disadvantage in society.
Further down the line, maybe 50-100 years, AR implants will be medically inserted. All the visuals and information that the glasses once did, will now be directly inserted into our visual cortex.
In 45yrs time you’ll all be dead and there will be no Internet or electronic devices . nuclear bombs have a habit of making things so 😂
There was so much to build up from and the limitations were obvious. Like someone with a black and white television must've been thinking one day it will show video in colour. A computer being able to produce realistic sound. A video game that could look more like real life rather than a few basic shapes and colours.
It's a lot harder to predict future tech today compared to then. Things will get more convenient, we'll get lazier and hopefully the planet can still be habitable for humans in 50-100 years.
Wow! This is jawdropping! Simpler days! Thanks for posting… Keep the great content coming!
Watching the football results on CEEFAX on a Saturday afternoon whilst reading the paper with a bottle of beer by the side of the sofa.
The Teletext decoder on top of the TV was made by Labgear in Cambridge, UK. I bought one second hand and still have it sitting in my garage. Its main circuit card was made by Texas Insturments.
I miss Pebble Mill program
Yes, it was a good daytime show with music and discussion in a studio with large windows so it looked like an outside broadcast. Why it was ever dropped I'll never know because it was a good format and very popular, but must have been cost I think. because they eventaully closed and sold the studios for development. That idiot Michael Grade I think was responsible
I was 3 months old when this was aired back then. My parents combined weekly wage was £105. This was £395.00 which was quite alot of money back then. So in today's climate that is now £2,128.50 crazy
Ceefax and teletext... I remember being like sports centre for my mates. I'd have the phone ceefax on the telly with the football scores and if a goal happened I'd ring my friend who supported that club to give them the good or bad news as it happened.
Occasionally I'd go home for lunch at school too and would return with the latest football news for the lads.
To think its instant now anywhere 🤣
@@andymerrett it was a differnt company that won the franchise and took over from oracle
The origin of those coloured buttons on bottom of the TV remote.
My friend and I used to book holidays in Majorca from the Ceefax travel pages, they always had some good deals !!
So did my dad.
I used to spend many a happy hour watching this and teletext. Miss it a bit.
I remember checking the Games Master page every Sunday looking for new cheats and tips for my Amiga games.
These videos are very high quality!
My God, imagine paying almost FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS for this, in 1977! That's 133 music records!
That's 50 grand in today's prices, or 20 litres of petrol.
@@robman80808 no it's not. That's not how it works. Infant.
£1883* for a teletext??? Literally mind-blowing 😲🤯 (*£395 in 1977)
Actually around £3072 !!
@@XXSkunkWorksXX 😱
That's not how it works. Infant.
@@kishascape Do explain.
Cant WAIT for the 300 million pages to read .
I remember ceefax and ITV’s Teletext and loved watching pages from Ceefax on BBC 2 late at night when nothing else was on.
They finally got rid of that box and incorporated the system into all Televisions so you didn’t need to attached something to your TV
@stoneage yes 300 was the sports front page
‘Press Reveal’
I loved that also, hearing the soft jazzy music as a teenager as bbc 2 turned off for a few hours. (BBC 1 by that stage always turned over to the news) and the flicking through of random Ceefax pages was lovely as I drifted to sleep. I just wish I could find the music
@@nriab23 Search for 'Pages From Ceefax' here on RUclips, there are a few uploads.
No they didnt.
Great channel.
What a brilliant time to be around in those days. 7th Jan 1977 at 13:07:46 pm according to Ceefax. Amazing how things changed so quickly
I liked having it on screen late at night with lights off and falling asleep to it
This was broadcast on my 6th birthday
I used to love ceefax kids joke when I was a kid
Love the text colour reminds me of my Sinclair spectrum
Bamboozle! I lived for that game
I play it on my phone now
2:40 he is essentially describing an early version of the internet. I don't recall this ever being on the market this early on (1979) though.
Bamboozle quiz on C4 😎👍
Loved watching the football results on Teletext.
Loved Pebble Mill 😊
Yes, its long gone now. Even the building isn't there anymore.
this idea of computers talking to eachother will never catch on
My parents used it alot for cheep holidays and my mum especially liked the recipes. You could also buy and sell on it too, my dad bought my older sisters first car off ceefax and there was quizzes and games too.
that interactive information tv was super impressive considering the time period.. i know ppl of today will laugh at it and criticize but if not for these early breakthroughs we wouldnt have the technology we have today.. so im really fascinated with old technology and how it changed the world
TV Teletext decoder circuitry was quite an early application of digital electronic circuitry in the home, although it was preceeded by handheld calculators and digital watches by a few years.
Well 1977 50 years later we have something like that
Now this brings back good memories. Back when I was a kid Teletext was my go to for all the latest football headlines & scores. Was an incredible invention. Back when times were far less stressful & care free. More technology developed more it became a problem
I used to have the football scores page on and it would show about 4 matches on the screen. It would loop round all the games and it was exciting when the page refreshed if there had been another goal. DER, Radio Rentals, Dixon's etc had the scores up on the TVs in the shop window and you would always find groups of gents and lads looking at the scores and final results. Was a common sight on Saturdays on the high street.
@@Martin-tp5ou As I said back when the days were good man. When football was on so was Teletext updating every goal scored. Great times man
Internet of the 70's
Ceefax had a good run - probably about 25 years - until Smart phones and digital TV took over in the 00s
I really miss playing Bamboozle. 🏴
My first experience of UK TV was seeing Ceefax broadcast as part of the daily schedules. I honestly thought that was the only TV you could get in the UK (I was 9)
That video game costing £20 in 1977 is the equivalent of £105 in 2022 money.
Never mind the gadgets I want those chairs 😍
Interesting headline visible at about 2:10 when they open the news page... in the evening of Thursday 6 January 1977, Frank Sinatra's mother, Dolly, was killed in a plane crash on the way to Las Vegas (along with her friend and the two crew of the private jet). As Pebble Mill was broadcast at 1pm UK time each day this would have been just a few hours before the broadcast.
I used to wait for the top 40 singles chart to be refreshed each week. They also had ZX spectrum game reviews, movie reviews and quizzes where you pressed reveal to get the answers. I would spend hours lying on the living room floor browsing Ceefax and Teletext. I learned to be patient waiting for pages to refresh compared to these days where everything has to be instant.
And the frustration of missing a page because your Mum came in at that exact moment to tell you to tidy your room! So you'd have to wait again for it.
@@davidjames579 There was a page hold feature I recall.
@@Thorpe Yeah but you had to wait for the page to come round and in that interim your Mum would distract you long enough for you to miss it appearing. It was like Magic how she timed her appearances.
@@Thorpe (Holding the page): In one way it was helpful, but in another way take it off hold and it would skip two/three pages.
Bamboozled was the one
Page 450. Bring it back.
@@mr.d5314 I'm impressed that you remember the page number Mr D ! good work 👍
I have happily blown away many many an hour on that page playing that game.
I suppose it is no longer a thing now..? 🤔
Since they turned off analogue and went all digital.
Alas.. Fond memory's aye
AHH yes I used to like that
Indeed, though it was on Teletext, not Ceefax.
(Bamboozled): Gimme Digitiser any day - for your video game news, views and cheats.
"300 miljon pages"! How long time will this take to scroll all these sides before you reach the one you were looking for!
In 45 years, everyone will watch this in 3D virtual reality auto generated from the video
Dad (David) is still going strong even if Ceefax isn’t 😅
Pedant in me says that Ceefax wasn't fully interactive, you just waited for the requested page to come along. There was a system called Prestel which used your phone line to communicate with the computer and the TV would download the page. Of course that wasn't free and it never caught on.
I’ll take two, one for the lounge and one for the bedroom.
I suspected just like these two gentlemen eventually the Punters lost interest after a few frustrating hours of this marvellous concept.
Bamboozled.
Long before the internet
It was long before the WWW of 1991 but the internet had been around since the early 70's and Teletext actually stunted the adoption of the internet in the UK as Teletext was free from it's inception in 1974 whereas the internet required you to phone numbers that were often on mainland Europe, this meant only rich middle class folks would access the internet before the WWW revolution of the mid-90's.
Based on inflation £20 in 1977 was the equivalent of £132 today and £399 the equivalent is £ 2,637
Thats a lot cheaper than the latest games consoles today.
No F in Fulham! 2:44
The video game we now commonly know as pong these day.
Technology always have some hiccups - take teletext: once you've keyed in the numbers and the page pops up, it would skip two/three pages even if you put it on hold/ or skip the page when you're half way though reading ("I was reading that")
was ceefax first in uk 🇬🇧 for interactive TV
Flippin heck, £395 in 1977?! That’s £2,200 in todays money. You could get a couple of very large screen TVs in 2023. How times have changed.
0:46 was that ITV or the other BBC Channel?
It was BBC1. The programme was called Pebble Mill at One, name after the old Pebble Mill Studios in outer Birmingham.
1977 £395 in 2022 = £3,033.93 *WOW!!*
I remember Ceefax - what ever happen to it??? 🤔🚂🚂🚂
It basically died when the analogue TV system was switched off in the UK.
@@johnr6168 Oh Ok - thanks 🙂🚂🚂🚂
I like how smart they are, attaching the remote to the TV so they don't lose it or stolen!
Our generation has definitely dumbed down!!!🖖😁
I'd be gutted if I bought ceefax in the early days for it only to become free and standard later.
I had a very old Phillips Tv that would suffer from interference from the teletext signals, lots of strange lines and dots across the top of the screen.
It wasn't interference as such. The way ceefax worked was that the signal was sent interlaced with the picture. CRT only drew a line of the image on the left to right sweep, ceefax was drawn with the right to left, so what your old telly was doing will have been not turning off the beam as it was going back to the left side to draw the next line (if that makes sense)
@@samroberts7404 Thank you, it does make sense.
@@samroberts7404 Would that explain why somebody on here said if they play an old VHS recording on their Teletext enabled TV, the pages for the day of the recording still come up? Because it's part of the recorded image?
@@davidjames579 yes, but it would have to be a good quality recording as any interference or static would cause potential problems with what was displayed
@@samroberts7404 That's amazing. Thank you very much for your answer.
Cee fax remained the same until the end in early 2000s
Continued until 2012 actually XD
@@breakingaustin it was actually anywhere from 2008 to 2012 depending on which region of the digital switchover you were in.
I don't remember teletext adaptors being sold, that would have converted any TV.
So you can use the TV for Entertainment or Education, Just like RUclips!
2:28 An early 404 error page 😅
Peter Kay (Ceefax/Teletext holidays): Booked it, packed it, f***ed off!
Get yourself on Ceefax!
Don't worry guys PC will take care of this. 😗
"Yes, you too can have access to Ceefax on your television set, for a mere £395 from Harrods!!!"
“If you find all this a little too intellectual…”
All that information coming through an electronic device? It'll never catch on.
Digitiser!
Wasn’t that the video game channel?
Isn't it still going kind of via metro news? Loved it whilst I ate cereal before school
@@daviddunn1657 ruclips.net/user/Digitiser
Loved those pages.
Ceefax only ceased in 2012, which is more mind boggling. It had been going for 3 years by the time of this video.
yes, in the last regions of the digital switchover.
Wait it was created in 1974?
@@southlondon86 Yep, apparently so. Probably researching it in the 60s. Wikipedia quote:-First in the world and original release: 23 September 1974 -; 23 October 2012.
South London 1986 eh. I was 18 living in Wimbledon then, great decade. Acid house was just around the corner, then it got interesting 😉
@@fraggit Films were far greater then too.
@@southlondon86 Yes. Here is a Blue Peter article about it from January 1975 ruclips.net/video/hOJ1rzLLFGY/видео.html
£395 in today's money is worth around £2000 or so 😯
While we're waiting for the sporsts headline.... 😂
I remember Cee fax well , a crude internet
Where's Bamber Boozler?
Cost over £3000 in today's money!!!
I've made some Lemon Pie.
The good old days where you could get instant County and International cricket scores with out the need to dial a premium rate phone number…
On a little pop up at the bottom of the screen so you could continue watching the telly!
@@therealcaldini ceefax never had this feature
That cost a fortune at the time!!!!!!
i would just like to say that i think we ve put such a premium on technology that we ve forgotten about our humanity..
395 quid for BBC Ceefax haha
A bit slow on downloading a Ceefax page. The word ceefax is unheard of in the spelling world. lol
1977 £20 in 2022 = £153.62
me watching this on my tv which literally has a web browser and youtube app
As interactive as changing channels lol
WOW, originally you had to pay for Ceefax....ouch.......
Yeah, for the original large STB with wired remote seen in this video. Of course later on teletext was built into TVs, and even then a teletext equipped TV was premium prices for a few years.