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This example from the Channel 4
ancillary
teletext service, 4-Tel, dates from 1990. 4-Tel was then in it's first incarnation. |
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When Oracle lost their franchise in
December 1992 4-Tel almost died and was reduced to just a few scant pages. |
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4-tunately it made a complete recovery. The service is run by Intelfax Ltd for Channel 4.
This example of the 4-Tel front page dates from 1996. |
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1999 |
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Not many people know that teletext pages,
although running from 100 to 899, are in fact hexadecimal numbers. The maximum permissible
page number is 8FF. These hexadecimal page numbers are used for secret pages, such as this
one from 4-Tel, which is PDC status information. You can find this on an ordinary teletext TV by going to page 399 (shown
above) and then pressing the red fastext key. |
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S4C, the Welsh equivalent of Channel 4,
has it's own service called Sbectel. The first
example is from 1988 |
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1990,
and very little has changed! |
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1992 |
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1993,
and with the demise of ORACLE the header row has changed, as have the page numbers. |
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1994 TTAN contributor Bryan Green comments "I think was still being
prodced by Intelfax at this time. My reasoning here is that the 'look' is as per
Intelfax's introduced in April 1991." |
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Sbectel page from
1994 -
Testun had just taken over the production of the text service on S4C. |
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We asked why it was called Sbectel. Hywel
Williams wrote to say: "I suspect it's an anachronism. When S4C first launched -
back in the days when Radio Times only had BBC programmes and TV Times only had ITV
programmes - TV Times in Wales only provided Channel 4 programme information. An insert
was provided in TV Times called Sbec, which was in Welsh and provided the S4C
programme information. Later, after the de-regulation of the programme guides, Sbec became
a separate magazine. Last time I lived in Wales it was still going but as an insert to one
of the editions of the Western Mail. I presume the name Sbectel comes from this magazine." (Sbec apparently translates as peek) |
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A word
from our sponsor! |
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These set of
frames is, as you can guess, from the digital version of S4C on the Astra
digital platform - 2001
This version of the channel is quite
different from the analogue one. |
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And finally, for now, a
system status page hidden away on a hexadecimal page number. |
