What can you see Bob? "Just Facts Jon, I can see-facts..." (Ceefax)

Member Name: Pjenkins

Product:	Ceefax
Date:	04/10/02 (565 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Simple, Accesible, Free

Disadvantages: Slow, Cumbersome

If this isn’t testing my writing skills, I don’t know what is…

MINDLESS PRE-AMBLE
It’s been six billion light years and you’ve traveled all the way from a small moon on the outskirts of Andromeda to discover life in the rest of the Universe. The hibernation sickness has made you a bit giddy anyway, and this hasn’t been helped by the fact that your robot pilot thought it would be a really good idea to see the red spot on Jupiter up close. (Apparently he’d promised his Mum a photo…). Finally, you’ve got sight of the Earth, the small blue planet you’ve been sent to research and you manage to tap in to its satellite frequencies. The general chit chat on the waves seems to be about something called ‘the web’ where people exchange information. Ah! Information! That’s what you came all this way for! Let’s have a look at this web thing then..

MCDONALDS - EBAY – NORTHUMBERLAND POLICE - DOOYOO – GRANNY SCARLLETT’s RECIPE FOR GATOR PIE – THE BBC- COLIN THE COCKNEY’S HOMEPAGE- YOU CAN DO IT IF YOU B&Q IT- TONY’S BOB MONKHOUSE TRIBUTE PAGE- AMAZON – BAZ’S OTHER WORLD- OTK THEATRE COMPANY- YAHOO –BOB’S PAGE OF DOGGIES- BIG GIRLS THAT WANT YOU NOW…..

Turn it off! Turn it off! That’s far too much to take in all at once! Look, I’ve travelled a very long way, I just want to kick back for a bit and find out what’s on TV tonight, maybe check on the footie scores, perhaps do a simple quiz….. In short I want to ‘see facts’….

CEEFAX
It’s something that the Brits did good at! Yes indeedy, it seems we invented the worlds first teletext system. The history is hazy (no bugger seems to want to claim actual responsibility through risk of being sued by the rest of the science-bod world) but it is widely believed that Ceefax was developed by BBC technicians
who used it to communicate with auntie’s transmitter sites around the UK.

The teletext service that we all know and love earned its patent in 1972 and was giving its first public airing in 1973. The following year the Independent Broadcasting authority announced its plans for a competing system ‘Oracle’ and the Post Office unveiled plans for its own internal teletext, named ‘Prestel’. The service, although simple has universal appeal and is still in use today in Dozens of countries across the globe, Ceefax itself being accessible through BBC channels 1 + 2.

THE CONCEPT & HOW IT WORKS
Ceefax is a magazine accessed through domestic television sets. Bascally , in the United Kingdom, television is transmitted using a system called PAL (Phase Alternating Line – don’t ask me what that means).PAL creates 625 lines on a television screen (as opposed to the 525 lines of the NTSC system in North America). PAL does not, however, use all 625 lines transmitted to create a picture; there are about 20 spare lines. Teletext/Ceefax uses these spare lines to provide information to the home user.

The operating concept is simple; each page of the magazine has a separate three digit page number. Input the page number you require using your remote, Ceefax searches for the page you want and hey presto, information in a matter of seconds! Bloomin marvellous.

STYLE
Ceefax is an extremely basic service and is essentially an information catalogue. There are five basic colours used- Red, Green, Blue, Yellow & White all set against a black background. If illustrations are needed, then the bods at Ceefax (whoever they may be) use all their artistic skills to make mosaic style pictures from brightly coloured squares. I have always had a bit of an admiration for whoever creates these pictures. Its takes a bit of practice I can tell you. Try it for yourself now. Open up Microsoft Paint, zoom in and as far as
you can then try and draw anything that looks like anything. Not an easy job.

FAST TEXT
There has been very little development with the teletext service over the past thirty odd years, bar one major breakthrough - shortcuts (as if we weren’t lazy enough). Even then, it's all mind bogglingly simple. Four options appear at the bottom of the Ceefax screen for anyone lucky enough to have a fast-text TV. They are colour coded and will take you straight to the page you want.. E.g For News, press yellow, for Sport press green etc. Its saves you those vital seconds in todays cut-throat world. More importantly however it gave birth to a media phenomenon. It gave birth to ….Bamboozle!

BAMBOOZLE
(N.B Before anyone says anything, I know this is not accessed through Ceefax, but through Channel 4’s teletext service, but you can’t mention the benefits of fast-text without Bamboozle! Channel 4/Page 365 for anyone who fancies it…)

Welcome to the simplest quiz known to man/woman/monkey. Twenty multiple choice questions all of which must be answered in order. No time limit, but if you get a question in the sequence wrong, you get sent back a couple of questions and your pride is severely dented. You answer by pressing the relevant colour on your remote. To give you some sort of picture as to how it works, here is a sample.

Q. Who is the lead singer of A-ha?
A) VAN MORRISON (RED)
B) MORTEN HARKET (YELLOW)
C) BRITNEY SPEARS (GREEN)
D) JEFFREY ARCHER (BLUE)

Okay, so they’re not all that easy (everyone knows about Jeffrey’s Scandinavian warblings on D-Wing) but that’s pretty much the format and should give you some idea. Check it out, it whiles away the hours on those ‘sick’ days.

PJENKINS USEFUL CEEFAX PAGES
News Headlines 101
Sport Index 300
TV Guide 600
What’s on TV Now & Next 606
Weather 400
This week’s lotte
ry Numbers 555
A-Z Index 199

Anything else, you can look for yourself!

THE FUTURE
It’s an age where any piece of information is available at your fingertips at any time. Using the internet you can get any number of statistics in seconds, easily surpassing anything that the 20 lines of text Ceefax provides will be able to give you. As Digital TV has its own equivalent service it is also increasingly likely that our dear teletext services will be extinct in a matter of a decade. But there will always be a place in my heart, and I’m sure for millions of others for that most simple of services, the teletext. It represents the last dying embers of the age when choice was limited, primary colours ruled and you just needed to know how it happened when it happened and didn’t require illustrations, supporting statistics, flash replays and of course live discussion forums. An age when ignorance was perhaps bliss. Ah, those were the days….

THE PAST
For a nostalgic look at how it used to be, check out….
http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/main .shtml

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