1975: CEEFAX - A Communications REVOLUTION? | This Is Ceefax | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
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- Опубликовано: 23 окт 2022
- Angela Rippon introduces Ceefax - the BBC's new dial-a-page news and information service. She visits the nascent Ceefax editorial unit in Television Centre, where Ian Morton Smith demonstrates some of the features of the system, and how he creates a Ceefax page.
What is the potential for this technology? Might it one day turn the humble television set into a home computer terminal?
Originally broadcast 15 July, 1975.
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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.
Me too, also born in 85. Used to spend hours going through ceefax after school!
They still use it in Scandinavia.
I was born in 84 and used it well into the 2000s too. I miss it. Bring back Digitiser!
@@BuJammy Yeah, my dad still use it. Live in Sweden, he's in his 60's.
I still use it on the BBC
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.
And it stayed that way for several years afterwards.
There wasn't a high street electrical goods retailer in Britain that didn't have enormous crowds outside it for two hours every Saturday afternoon.
That was me minus the colours. Lmao.
There was one point where internet sports reporting was still slower than Ceefax, and one enterprising young lad made money copying the scores from Ceefax and uploading them onto the Internet. True story!
Never mind when Ceefax first come out, even until the late '90s it was the easiest way to get live scores. Sky had Soccer Saturday, but first you'd have to pay an obscene amount of money for Sky Sports(approx. £60 a month with inflation taken into account) and even then you had to wait for it to roll around to the right league, whereas each league on Ceefax had its own live score page you could just leave it sitting on, with a refresh time of every about 10 seconds or so.
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!
🤗🍹
Okay...
youre joking ....
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!
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.
Looks promising! Hope they make it available in the states.
You never know
Yeah… you never know if there still is an analog signal out there…
@@chetapace79 It doesn’t depend on analogue signals. Here in Europe we still have the service with digital television while the system still works the same with a couple of decoded scan lines.
still widely used here in europe . was useful to have subtitles in movies for the deaf, latest news, real time sports results
@@Rudolf_Edward Works differently over digital. It's actually a data channel.
Angela Ripon has pirate bay on the tv 8:58 🤣
I miss teletext! Total nostalgia rush, anyone remember bamboozled?! :)
Only just I think and only because you said it. We never had a TV that could pick it up until it was on its way out. Our great aunt had it down by the coast but I could hardly get a look in to view it.
Used to love bamboozled!
Press REVEAL to see my answer
Bamboozled was great.
Good old Bamber Boozler!
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
It's hard to explain how magical it felt to someone who didn't experience it at the time.
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.
In the 50s, 60s and 70s and even into the 80s the BBC was an absolute powerhouse of innovation
Don't forget they pioneered with Internet services, iPlayer etc
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.
I always thought that they used the BBC Micro for Teletext because the text is the same font etc.
Definitely want to know more about this!!
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!
Computers were good in the 1970s but not that good!
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.
Teletext is also still available in Spain and Italy
That’s really interesting. Is it mostly older people that use it or do young people use it too? Maybe I misunderstand how it works, but I would think that Googling from one’s phone would be way faster in almost any context.
@@olive8604, in most cases, it is the other way around, meaning that it is, for its purpose, faster than Googling the info. Basically, when you are watching a programme on TV, you just click on the teletext button, and a lot of info about that particular programme will appear on screen, and there you will have the option to explore other unrelated topics as well
Teletext is still alive in Sweden. I prefer to get my daily news from it because each article is short and concise within a page or two, without cruft or images.
Although ... nowadays I more often use a teletext reader on the web than pressing buttons on the remote.
A type of Ceefax still exists on BBC TV. It's mainly done using coloured buttons, but the page numbers can also be used.
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.
Brilliant. I had just turned 3 a few months earlier in 1975.
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 bet that was a great sleepy place to reside in the 60 70
Much better than Centre House, or wherever R&D are now.
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!! 😀
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.
Agree, TVR 1 still has got teletext, but not on the HD version.
I think UK Teletext was replaced by a separate MHEG data stream.
The ENTIRE SIGNAL is now digital.....Teletext as it existed back then is dead and gone. (The name remains...but it was primitive tech.)
Note how you can switch on "annotations" and even "translations" and see several stations at once.
And.... you can link directly to every available website in the world directly from your TV screen.
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!
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.
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.
My dad used to use Ceefax quite a bit back in the day. Brings back memories seeing this.
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.
Now you've unlocked a memory, I think the Bamboozle quiz on Channel 4 Teletext used to use the page numbers with letters in when you pressed one of the coloured fastext keys to answer the questions.
@@beerbuildings Oh yeah, the fast text buttons could do it too. When TV cards came out for PCs some of them supported teletext and some would cache the pages allowing you to browse all the extra stuff.
I never knew that! Thank you :)
And the beautiful Angela Rippon, as well! I'm surprised my Dad hasn't popped back from his cloud for a quick gander! 😉
My Uncle and Aunt had a TV with ceefax in the early 80’s, it was ground breaking!
My family got one in 1982 for the first time, and we used Ceefax and Prestel from then onwards.
Haha! In my younger days when ceefax was still a thing, we used to refer to it as 'The Cornish internet'!
What a great service this was, anyone play Bamboozle on Channel 4? or read the best games magazine that ever was... Digitiser
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.
I still used it till a few months ago before I cancelled my cable subscription. I loved the simplicity of it.
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
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!
Indeed! Teletext in its full glory survived well into the 2000s. I remember some nifty artwork artwork and graphics as a kid in the later years. Especially considering they were still using the same tech and medium from the early 80s.
Mode 7 😂 brought back memories of programming "Grannies Garden" from the BBC Micro handbook at school!
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
OMFG, the OPTIMISM for a TV screen's possibilities shown at the end of this video! If ONLY that presenter knew THEN!!!
Page 152, Bamboozle! Brilliant game, used to play it before going to school in the mornings.
God, I'm 28 and I feel old. I remember us using Teletext for the lottery results, the weather and cinema times.
It was better than the internet, because with the internet you waste huge amounts of time looking at trashy news, no matter how hard you try not to. You just saw useful news with teletext and ceefax.
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
Now we have BBC I
A variant was developed to insert Teletext data into the 525 line system. Seems to never been marketed.
You know why it probably didn't happen in the USA? Because it cost money and nobody wanted to pay for it.
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!!
Every country was like that until videos (VCRs for Americans) hit the shops as there was no point in broadcasting for people who are asleep. Have you never watched the movie Poltergeist? At 2am the TV plays the US national anthem and then turns into white static as the signal ends for the night, then it eats that wee lassie.
@@krashd ....Yes, I have seen it! But America had 24 hr TV way before the UK. They had it from about 1985.
Btw, that Poltergeist film is still pretty trippy and scary.....even 40 years on!
24 hours a day telly started on Yorkshire Television. From August 1986 there was a recorded through-the-night music video show called Music Box. Went on until TVAM started up in the morning. (Yes, I entered the ZZ Top "How long is Biilly Gibbon's beard" competion... and no I didn't get to Houston to see them) ruclips.net/video/zAVme3j1i2w/видео.html
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.
On the other hand when I think back to how primitive so-called Personal Computers were in 1975, it amazes me just how much *could* be achieved with Ceefax and Oracle in terms of text, colours and "images" almost half a century ago! 🙂
@@davidkmatthews The available colours wre simply the various combinations of the three primary colours. The graphics was quite clever as it was based on a 3 high x 2 wide block of 6 squares which sat in the same space as a character otherwise could. The squares could be 'On' or 'Off' in any combination, but any 'On' squares had to be the same colour within each block. Placing a multitude of blocks side by side allowed primative images to be built up.
I used teletext on our TV set in Nigeria in 2004. Fascinating.
We need a petition to bring back Ceefax. I miss it 🤧😭
The new version of it still exists, the one where you have to press red, yellow, blue, green buttons, but it's really rubbish compared to when you just dialled in the number.
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
Ceefax/Oracle were awesome. Digital text on Freeview seems far more sluggish in my experience...
True. A system in 2023 is actually worse than one that started in 1974.
The most dated (but also nostalgic) part of this report was that shot of Woolworths in the background!
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.
This was my birth year! I always find it fascinating to see what was going on at that time.
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!
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.
Ceefax was my internet, before the internet!
Ceefax was like the internet but without all the trashy rubbish.
I seem to remember seeing live football scores in a ‘Newsflash’ box. Does anyone else remember that?
Putting 888 on the TV even though you didn’t need to!
That "television monitor" looks suspiciously like our trusty Sony 13" colour TV which served our family for many years...
The BBC used loads of Sony consumer TV's in non broadcast situations in 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's.
Press ‘Reveal’. Remember that?
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.
10:02 Can you imagine that..... in 1975😲
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?
It doesn't. Ceefax was developed in 1972 and first broadcast in 1974, the ARPANET was developed in 1969.
@@octaviussludberry9016 True, but Ceefax was widely used by ordinary people for a lot longer and earlier than the internet of course.
@@ajs41 I know, that wasn't what the OP was saying though.
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.
¹
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!
Never seen that
@@garryleeks4848 Presumably it was a dummy page created by a football fan with a Pythonic sense of humour. In May 1975 - when it seems this was filmed - West Ham (Billy Bonds, captain) won the FA Cup. References to Filbert Street (Leicester's ground) and Craven Cottage (Fulham's) also support the idea.
Wow! This was before any computers were mainstream! WOW!
Choosing a holiday using CEEFAX was great. I had a mate who happily watched the Windies play cricket over the same.
Wow almost 50yrs ago!! now we get "ceefax" on our hand sized phones
That's because in 2012, after Northern Ireland switched off their analogue TV signal, Ceefax was no more.
10:05 shocked me at first
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.
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.
Was also very popular in Austria since 1980.
used to like playing bamboozle on ch4
I remember reading Digitiser on teletext! It was great.
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...
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 🦵
She's the BBC's knees!
@@petergivenbless900 😄👌
I just checked the train timetables on ceefax - they are still on strike 😅
2:40 I am now telling the computer *exactly* what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate!
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
Remember refreshing the racing pages constantly for my mum to get the horse & dog results.
Great days.
This seems very advanced for 1975. Must of seemed like magic at the time.
They also made TVs that could print out Ceefax pages on to paper, PHILIPS 26CS3890/08R
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.
Better than lots of websites today, let's face it!!
No hidden agenda trackers, and no annoying pop up ads.
Imagine it - a mobile phone with Teletext, instead of Google and all that other 💩
It's the internet but without all the trashy rubbish. So it was superior in my opinion.
It is funny to think of a TV as a piece of furniture now.
in Australia it was known as Teletext operated by channel seven
Ceefax with subtitles for the blind… ingenious
We had this in Australia, It was called Teletext and was retired quite a few years ago.
Teletext was also used as a name here in the UK. It was the generic name for it. BBC's version was called Ceefax, ITV and Channel 4's version was called Oracle. It was retired in about 2012 over here when the switchover to digital TV happened. Actually, there is a new version of it, where you press red, blue, yellow or green buttons, but it isn't as good.
Yet another Great British invention from the BBC and British boffins now forgotten and was revolutionary before the Internet, though should I mention Prestel?
Ptestel was always commercial use only as it was so expensive to use. I started using it in 1994 for my business banking.
Wow this is fab! 😂🎸🤘😎
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.
That hilarious job of typing headlines off teleprinter printouts back into a computer...
Like people who print out emails in an office then get some poor sod to "scan them in to the computer" in order to "file" it.
05:00 the memoriessssss
Wow - this was filmed the month I was born.
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
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!
Excellent that it's still going in Italy.
Not sure why he wanted to point out the Headlines graphic as it clearly says 'Heodlines'.
Loved playing the kids games on it
Great for the footie scores....
In the Netherlands it was called “Teletext”
That is the generic name. CEEFAX was a BBC brand. ITV used Oracle to denote its teletext service.
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 🤣🤣
Quickly press hold, where's the remote?? Ah f
How black and dotted the main pages of the channels choosing were, damn, I miss that
This is so interesting, but also kind of adorable, was hard to not laugh at him showing off the flashing text
Wow she made a grand prediction at the end and was right 😎👍
It came to pass earlier than you might think. The Bank of Scotland launched their home banking system, which allowed customers to view their bank accounts on their TVs, via Prestel, in 1985.
@@nkt1 🤗
They look surprisingly quite a lot like later BBS pages from the late 80s/early 90s. Sort of a great-great-grandfather to the Internet.
Yep, very simple pages hidden among the v-blank signal, hence why some "page rolls" are quick and some slower, more detail, more v-blanks required for that particular page. Later on a "Hold" feature was added, where the next few pages were held in a small bit of RAM, while the rolling was still happening in the background, so for articles that spanned several consecutive pages, they could be advanced at will. Provided they were cached.
If one has a recording of a TV program on VHS, the data is still preserved. There's an archive project (search; teletextarchaeologist ) seeking home recordings on VHS to capture the data to ressurect as much as possible, much like wayback machine!
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!
Yes. They where standard in most PAL sets by the late 1980s. Also known as Teletext. The Independent TV companies version was called Oracle, then later ITV Teletext.
It must have been integral to newer sets because, growing up in the 80s, we never had any set top box, just a TV. That said, I have a vague feeling that on smaller sets such as the one we had in the dining room and the one in my bedroom one couldn't get Ceefax/Teletext, so perhaps it was only larger sets which had the technology included while smaller ones didn't have it, to keep cost/size down for the smaller units.
@@danyoutube7491 Yep. Cheaper TVs didn't have it.
I had a BBC Master 128k computer, and it had a separate decoder which made it receive .
I have an old Labgear teletext separate decoding box sitting in my garage. Comparatively few were used because they were quite expensive and also because it wasn't long before decoding was incorporated into many TVs. The added cost of decoding within TV wasn't that much in relative terms.