The Teletext Museum

AN EVENING WITH CEEFAX

Thanks to Mark Cook we can now transport ourselves to 1983 and look through the BBC1 Ceefax magazine as broadcast one October evening that year...

Please note that multiple sub-pages (and subtitles!) are not available.

A few of the interesting things worth pointing out:

• The Alarm Clock page - 160 - was updated every minute providing the original intended use for the Time Coded Page function. At the preselected time the ALARM CLOCK graphic would be superimposed onto the picture in a similar way to a newsflash. (These days the TCP function is more commonly used to access a specific sub-page.)
• Subtitles were not always on 888. At first they were on 170 (BBC1), 270 (BBC2) and 199 (ITV). This was thought to be needlessly confusing and subtitles were later allocated page 888 on all channels. (Can anyone remember the date that change took place?)
• Back in 1983 only a minority of programmes were subtitled so page 170 also doubled as an extra edition of No Need To Shout which I seem to remember was updated more frequently than the main edition on page 169 - it also gave information about the programmes which would be subtitled.
• P173 was used for all ITV programmes including Ch4 and S4C.

The raw data for these pages was saved to tape drive by Mark Cook who wrote software to recover the data and save it to PC. He then e-mailed the individual frames to TTAN where I decoded it into Videotex, corrected any errors and converted them to GIF files. The HTML interface was contributed by David Bennett. We hope they bring back a few memories for you.

Ceefax on BBC1 and BBC2 | BBC teletext from their newer services
Ceefax Regional-Extra | Ceefax In Vision | Telesoftware

An Evening with PText

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