Ceefax dies today

Ceefax will be switched off today which may cause pain to some. I have to say, however, that I have not used it in years and didn't think much of it in the first place. Yep, miserable old me...

From ars technica- "After 38 years the BBC is retiring Ceefax, ending the first era of digital content delivery to the home.

Launched in 1974, Ceefax was the world's first teletext service—a proto-Internet delivering text and graphics to British televisions. When normal programs finished at the end of every day, pages from Ceefax would carry on scrolling, keeping insomniacs and night workers company through the wee hours. Its cheesy synthesized music is arguably as iconic a sound of its time as the squeal of a dial-up modem was to the 1990s.

Ceefax was first developed by the BBC as a way to transmit subtitles using unused parts of the broadcast spectrum, but researchers at the broadcaster realised that the same technology could just as easily handle full pages of text. That led to the first test transmissions in 1974, with a formal rollout in 1976. Early television sets needed a special chip to be able to receive and store the information as it was broadcast—many of those reading this will remember waiting for a page to refresh, watching the ticker at the top right which slowly crept upwards as each page was rebroadcast with new information."

Comments

[Gavin]

Ceefax we will miss you.