12 votes

The rise and fall of teletext

3 comments

  1. calm_bomb
    Link
    Wow... I have some great memories of teletext. Coming from the "communist era", in Romania, we only had black-and-white TV, so the biggest change was the colour TV. But then, around 1992-93, when...

    Wow... I have some great memories of teletext. Coming from the "communist era", in Romania, we only had black-and-white TV, so the biggest change was the colour TV. But then, around 1992-93, when small companies started providing satellite TV through cable, we were on our way to get on (almost) the same level as civilized countries. Our first colour TV was a GoldStar (now LG), if I remember correctly and it had teletext. We were getting the TV programme and news and then the national TV started posting movie reviews and sport reports. In the same period we got MTV and there were a lot of music news in there, but one thing I remember very well is that they had a sort of database of bands and ways to contact them - and besides postal addresses and phone numbers I started seeing web and email addresses. I clearly remember seeing something like contact@ironmaiden.co.uk, band@acdc.com and so on... but at that moment I didn't understand what they were. I had no concept of what the internet was and it was a mistery for me - until around '96, when a friend came home from university and told us about this thing called "yahoo".

    Later in the late '90s we started seeing live scores from different sports, then they started posting all kinds of ads - especially for sex phone lines. Then betting companies started buying space to post odds and results and so on. I think I remember some trivia games too, but I'm not so sure.

    So, yeah, teletext was a great way to find out things back then and it was sort of a gateway to the internet for me.

    3 votes
  2. Kremor
    Link
    I never heard of teletext before and the fact that something like this existed so early on completely blow my mind.

    I never heard of teletext before and the fact that something like this existed so early on completely blow my mind.

    1 vote
  3. kwyjibo
    Link
    This brings back happy memories. In the late 90s, I remember my parents buying a Sony Trinitron TV (don't remember the exact model, but for some reason I remember it having a completely flat...

    This brings back happy memories. In the late 90s, I remember my parents buying a Sony Trinitron TV (don't remember the exact model, but for some reason I remember it having a completely flat screen and 100hz display). While using it, I remember stumbling upon Teletex by complete accident, because people, especially children, seldom interacted with technology in an informed way back then. I remember it feeling like magic. I don't think I felt that way even when I first used a touch screen. You could check live scores, news, daily schedule of the channel and so much more (I completely forgot about making your paid messages appear on the screen!) in that limited format and space. I definitely think, even today, we have a lot to learn from a system like Teletex. Constraints bring a lot of good ideas to surface.

    Thanks for sharing this, it was a really good video!

    1 vote