Old tech

[cressy]

For some unknown reason I wondered whether ceefax was still going. So i looked. It ceased transmitting when analogue TV was switched off, and the bandwith it was transmitted on was sold off and now carries 4g.

This led to wondering wether video plus codes were still in the telly paper. Dunno, but i alwats found that recordings missed the last minutes of the start and end.

As vinyl n valves, the elder statesman of old tech are still going, I wonder what other old tech might be resurrected.

Some geeks have figured out how to get ceefax working again using a raspberry pi and the interweb plugged into an old TV that has the text buttom on the remote, so who knows what else might be brought back........

[jack]

They're not really geeks. The guy that's done this was a Teletext engineer back in the day and there is a commercial application for the VBIT encoder (betting shops).

Being a bit pedantic here, but "Teletext" was the technology, "Ceefax" was the BBC's implementation and "Oracle" was ITV's.

I mentioned in a previous post about travel agent systems and how a lot of people there were called Sharon or Tracey... well, all those systems used cheap small colour ANSI X3.64 VDUs driven by Teletext emulators... I wrote a lot of that code, including an ANSI driver and emulator for X Terminals....

My, all that was a long time ago...

[Mike H]

This led to wondering wether video plus codes were still in the telly paper. Dunno, but i alwats found that recordings missed the last minutes of the start and end.

I would have thought made obsolete by on-screen TV guides. Select item to record. Still the same problem of missed minutes if programme overruns tho. But at least one has the option to add a minute ot two to the end by editing the record list entry.