Teletext in North America
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TeletextVintage TechnologyBroadcasting History
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Teletext
Vintage Technology
Broadcasting History
The article discusses the history of teletext in North America, and the discussion revolves around personal experiences, technical details, and comparisons with European teletext implementations.
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
https://www.teletext.ch/
https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/teletext/id308630240?l=en-GB
By the way, an interesting book called "La TV da sfogliare. 1984-2024. 40 anni di Televideo" by Guido Barlozzetti came out this year.
It's super interesting (if you speak Italian and) if you're curious about the history of the Italian teletext.
In my view Teletext has a great property: A single page is short. Thus news articles must be compact and straight to the point. Unlike the text here, which I can fill with fluff, unrelated side remarks and repetition, a teletext author has to find the essence in the news and focus. That makes scanning Teletext news quick while giving a good view on what is "important" (by the standards of that broadcaster)
I assure you, Pravda could fit it's biases, lies, propaganda, and omissions in 160 characters. Bullshit has always been easy to shrink.
It is nuance, context, framing, etc that you are eschewing in your mistaken belief of "no bias".
It is quite different: Having such a limited channel as Teletext one has to be even more selective on the news being reported and then which aspects of it to report.
Over here in Germany I got some TV stations discussing on celebrity news, some station focusing on economy/business news, others on political things, some in sports.
But yeah, USA has this "two sides" issue with a touch of zero sum (it's always either this or that side and either helping one or the other side)
https://nmsceefax.co.uk
I feel like Homer Simpson, learning about Deng Xiaoping's death from a Powersauce bar.
It seems like it would be a pretty neat little hobby project to develop a common teletext viewer / aggregator for all of these links people are putting up!
https://rtve.es/television/teletexto
Private channels have teletext pages too.
The website (https://nos.nl/teletekst/101) and app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eoffice.an...) are very popular (no ads on either), but so is the website which covers a fraction of a modern browser's screen.
There's something about the short-form just-the-facts writing that makes information and news much easier to read than the puff pieces you find on many websites these days.
At least that was the state about 10 years ago, maybe they upgraded the infra since then.
https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
ssh teletekst.nl
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
Teletext was made by major broadcasters, so NBC/ABC/CBS in the US might have had a service. It is just broadcasted as part of the signal, so the actual hardware is in the end users device. All TV's in the UK and Europe just had teletext decoders built in as standard. The cost of entry was not high at all. The only expense was updating the content. But honestly, that wasn't really a massive effort unless you wanted a lot of graphics (ASCII style, obviously.) It was a bout as much effort as a local news paper or a well maintained BBS.
A late 80s / early 90s BBS is no comparison. Cost-per-everything in computers had plummeted by then--even kids could host a BBS with the family computer.
Per wiki on Prestel (i know it's videotex, but the article covered both):
Hosting Costs:
> In 1985, British Telecom estimated that for an IP using a typical minicomputer (such as the PDP-11) located 100 km from London and handling up to 10 users simultaneously at peak times, the one-off software set-up cost would be at least £16,000, communication costs would range from £4,280 to £5,550 a year (depending on the type of connection), and Prestel usage would cost £8,600 a year.[82]: 4
Usage Costs:
> At the launch of the commercial service in September 1979, and in addition to phone charges, users were charged 3p per minute online to Prestel from 8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday, and 3p for three minutes at other times. Installing a phone jack-socket cost £13, with a quarterly rental of 50p. Business users paid an additional standing charge (i.e., a flat charge regardless of usage) of £12 per quarter.[23]
> By October 1982, the online usage charge had risen to 5p per minute (8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday and also 8 am to 1 pm on Saturdays, free at other times), the business standing charge to £15 per quarter, residential users now paid £5 per quarter, and jack installation cost "from £15", with a 15p quarterly rental fee.[24]: 2
Content Distribution Costs:
> A main IP rented pages from the Post Office (initially) or British Telecom (later), and controlled a three-digit master-page in the database. In 1982, this cost an annual £5,500 for a basic package,[24]: 1 equivalent to around £29,000 in 2021.[80]
Prestel was something else. It was a teletext style system, but teletext was on every TV in the UK after the BBC started broadcasting CEEFAX (their service) and ITV started providing TELETEXT (their service). Channel 4 also had a service, but I don't remember what it was called.
Teletext was using the same style of presentation (BBC Micro had mode 7, and this was Prestel/Teletext compatible.) But Teletext was one way - it was broadcasted as part of the TV signal and your TV would decode the data and display it. If you wanted a specific page, you entered the number and then the receiver waited for the broadcast to get to that page and it decoded it and displayed it. There was no uplink. It all happened as part of the transmission and all of the pages were transmitted serialy in order so you would feel like entering in 123 would load page 123 directly, but actually it was displayed the next time 123 was transmitted.
And there were no per minute costs. Teletext was part of the video signal. Every page was transmitted over and over and the TV just chose which one to display. Now expensive TVs could also cache some pages or even all 1000 (this was the max number)
To try and solve the chicken-and-egg problem with the adoption of teletext decoders, Keyfax started in Chicago by broadcasting a static rotation of the data pages all through the overnight hours. It was kind of fascinating to watch back then.
https://youtu.be/Bgs0kbxo68w
Also Sacramento NBC 3 started delivering closed-captioning in 1977.
FCC didn’t standardize until 1980.
I still have the decoder box.
Subtitles at page 888 too, where the subs could be overlaid on top of a movie instead of the full TTXT page.
It actually had quite impressive graphics capabilities, although the vector graphics took some time to draw (using NEC V30 CPUs), and an additional graphics processor chip (made my Intel if I recall).
Data Broadcast being a commercial use of the UK TV channel for various things, i.e. essentially a commercialization of the data channel over which Teletext was sent, Teletext had some of the flyback lines, DB had some others.
https://vintagecomputer.ca/agvision-videotex-terminal/