2/3/2024 0 Comments Teletext contact numberIf 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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