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The Teletext Museum. |
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TELETEXT GALLERY
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ITV's new teletext service took over from ORACLE at the stroke of midnight on 01-Jan-1993.
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Rather confusingly they called themselves,
er, Teletext.
Click here for more ITV pages from the early hours of 1-Jan-1993 which show that Teletext Ltd. weren't quite as prepared for their on-air debut as they might have liked! |
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From a P.R. point of view they found themselves with quite a lot to do. Oracle had suddenly become very popular since the announcement of their closure. Like the other new franchise awards at that time the public could not understand the decisions and had no sympathy with them. |
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Teletext obviously tried to make a virtue out of being new and different. Their new news pages, which replaced the excellent ITN service were first broadcast on Channel 4. |
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This fine
set of pages was captured from an early S-VHS tape recorded in January
1993 and shows the fledgling Teletext service in its first
month of operation.
If you have any old S-VHS tapes it is possible that we may be able to recover teletext data from them. Please contact us. |
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Continuing
this set from January 1993 we are reminded that when the Teletext service
started the news pages were not on ITV but on Channel 4.
This was an unpopular move because at that time Channel 4 was not yet broadcasting 24 hours a day and the news pages were regularly unavailable overnight. |
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Here we see
examples from Teletext's innovative but short-lived After Hours
service.
These pages were of a more adult nature and were only available after 2300. |
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After only a few weeks, changes were announced. After Hours did indeed disappear, but as far as I can remember it never returned. |
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Oracle used to have a separate magazine for regional pages, but Teletext
seamlessly integrates them into the news, traffic and "what's-on" pages. This page, as indicated, comes from the Scottish television region. |
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Another example of Teletext's regional service, this time from the West Midlands, which is a sub-region within the Central ITV region. |
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The WestCountry regional index on Teletext |
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We apologise for the poorer quality of these five images - they are scanned from a Teletext Printed Guide for 1995 |
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Teletext "relaunch" their Channel 4 service on 1-Dec-1996, however it took a while for everything to settle down. |
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The Channel 4 index page (401) just before the 1996 relaunch took effect .. |
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...and after. Not a radical relaunch, more of a "musical page numbers". |
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Page 379 gives you full details as to how well the Teletext computer system is working. Simple isn't it? |
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The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales,
6th September 1997. Teletext loses most of it's colour, every page sporting a white logo and white cross. All advertising is cancelled, the usual spots are replaced with "Today's Prayer". |
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The news headlines are dominated by one subject alone. Not much else happened that day - and even if it did, it did not get reported. |
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In 1999
Teletext gained two more data lines in the VBI (vertical blanking
interval). The Sports pages moved to pages 400+ and other pages moved as
well.
But which page has the Air Quality info moved to?! |
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Here's the new P101 showing where some of the new pages have moved to... |
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...while P102 provides a
little behind-the-scenes info.
This animated GIF includes all 9 sub-pages. |
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This is Teletext having one of their rare reshuffles in October 1999 |
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The Teletext status page, presumably showing details of when updates are sent from Horseferry Road out to the regions. (Nov-1999) |
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1-Nov-2000 sees a subtle change in identity for Teletext Ltd. |
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These two
frames are from Datacast transmissions made using ITV pages 798 and 799.
The second of these is actually sub-page 64/64, the other 63 sub-pages
apparently being blankety-blank!
What does it all mean...? |
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The Teletext Museum
is a collaboration with |
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