It may have taken a bit longer to get to that page of interest, but waiting to press the “hold” button just in time was just another part of its analogue charm.I have recently bought a holiday to Cuba through teletext holiday and I have to say that I was extremely disappointed with their service. It gave us the first taste of an array of commercial possibilities available to us even as we sat on our sofas. Today, it is estimated the revenue made from apps and text services linked to television shows is more than £100m, though they were already £57m in 2014 – the year ITV made voting on X-Factor free.īut it was CEEFAX and Teletext that ushered in the world of the web we all now take for granted. As late as 1998 Minitel was generating more than €80m and despite the development of the internet the service was not finally closed down until June 2012. I remember seeing lurid adverts for Minitel adult services on the Paris Metro in the early 1990s. This was all taking place before anyone outside of a university science lab in the rest of the world had any kind of online connection. While the government were most keen to emphasise “online” shopping, travel purchases and similar services, what became known as the “Messageries roses” services proved unexpectedly popular (“pink messages” were a euphemism for adult chat services). One of the French Minitel machines from the early 1980s. So information like the weather forecast fit the bill perfectly. Originally, CEEFAX and Oracle/Teletext were intended to supply mundane so-called “medium-latency information” (things that couldn’t wait for next morning’s papers) but which were not so time-sensitive – things that you had to know the exact second it happened. This is despite the fact that the internet increasingly became the first place anyone would look if they wanted information on anything from holidays, to voting on their favourite TV reality show. But now it was digital you could go directly to the page you wanted (no more sushi conveyor belt). The information, however, lived on within the Red Button. With the arrival of CEEFAX, people could look up any of these things in a few minutes on their TVs using their remote control – and remote controls were pretty cutting-edge in the 70s too.ĬEEFAX finally gasped its last breath in 2012 with the digital switch-over. If you wanted to know the football scores, you had to go to the newsagents and buy a newspaper and if you wanted to know what time to catch the train to London you had to go to the station and pick up a printed timetable. But in 1974 if you wanted to know the headlines you had to wait for the next news bulletin. Just 200 pages of information (made up of 25 lines with only 40 characters on each line) may seem hopelessly primitive these days when you can stream box sets to your mobile. It was a bit like waiting for your favourite sushi dish at one of those Japanese restaurants which use a conveyor belt to deliver the food, or your suitcase at an airport baggage claim. So you would put in the page number you wanted to see using your remote control, but it could take some time before that page came around again. CEEFAX, on the other hand, sent each page in turn, on a sort of endless loop. When you fetch a web page, your browser sends a request to the server and the server sends the requested data back to you. For reasons to do with the hardware (big glass cathode ray tubes and heavy electromagnets) there had to be a couple of milliseconds of pause between each frame of the moving image – and that pause was when the CEEFAX pages were transmitted. Both services depended on a quirk of the old analogue TV signal. It was joined by Independent Television’s Oracle (later renamed Teletext) in the early 1980s. CEEFAX was the world’s first text information service which started in 1974.
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