TELETEXT

The Early Years

nother way to attract feedback was to advertise birthdays, as in this promotion linked to the ITV 21 celebrations. I sent in a postcard for some relatives, and the result was these two screens. The first uses the teletext 2x3 block graphics, and the second uses text only. That's because Oracle were kind enough to send out thermal printouts, which could contain only text, to the lucky birthday girls and boys.

he 1976 specification introduced four new display modes - Double Height, Background Colour, "Discrete" Graphics and "Held" Graphics, whereby the most recently transmitted graphics character could be displayed instead of the blank character normally used in place of a "control" character.

Flushed with success at constructing the WW decoder, I designed a new board to display these new modes. It seems to have taken me about a month, just after Easter 1977 to install. Note that the colour change is specified to take place at the right-hand edge of a character, though the WW decoder (because all colour changes originally took place invisibly during a black space) had the change occur mid-way through a character. You can see that the changes from blue to yellow, prior to the word "HOLD" are half a character early. I corrected this later.

..and this one demonstrates background colour.

his creditable rendering of the LWT logo looked a mess without the new facilities, but unfortunately I didn't take a "before" picture. Note that in the 1976 specification there was no provision for black text on a coloured background, though this was brought in later in the "Full Level One Facilities" (FLOF) specification that also included the concept of four coloured Fastext links at the bottom of the page. Ceefax has very rarely used black text, though other services, notably Channel Four's 4-Tel magazine produced by Intelfax, more frequently do so.

EEFAX were very wary about introducing New Technology (a dispute with ACTT had put ORACLE off the air for many months) and so it wasn't until 1978, when agreement had been reached to use an appropriate VDU (as they called monitors in those days) that they started to try them out on air. These shots show a couple of the designs transmitted as a test. I turned off the background colour for the first picture, to show how it would have been displayed on an old-style decoder.

You will note that I have added a blue background to the clock at top right, which is permanently cut into the tv picture. Other peculiar "bespoke" effects were to follow.

ere in this incarnation of CEEFAX on 2 however, there's a distinctly busier look to the design, with the new facilities in evidence.

The very first CEEFAX magazine was transmitted on one channel only, then it was duplicated on the other, with BBC2 using an updated set of "control codes". Originally both had page numbers in the 100s on one day and 200s the next. Eventually, a different service was transmitted on each channel, with BBC1 using Magazine 1 and BBC2 magazine 2, and the old control codes were abandoned.

The two services continued like that for many years, until in the late eighties CEEFAX was relaunched with several magazines on each channel. Many pages were common to both, many were different, and some were unavailable, or switched channels, at various times of day and on different days of the week. The Great British Public were not ready for such a complex service and soon it changed to what it is today, with most pages duplicated on both channels and available all day and all week.

hen ORACLE (and CEEFAX for that matter) began broadcasting, the magazines were inserted into the video signals emanating from London, and could only be received in the regions if they passed through all the intervening equipment undisturbed. If a local programme (or adverts, or continuity announcement) were on-air, there was no teletext. Eventually "Data Bridges" were installed at all ITV and later BBC studio centres so that the teletext signal could be stripped off the sustaining video feed from London and inserted into the signal going to the local transmitter. In addition, the London signal was cleaned up, which improved reception, and local pages could also be inserted.

If the signal from London failed, the ITV regional Data Bridges inserted a simple test magazine 1, comprising 99 pages of the caption shown here, and a clockcracker on p199. Although the ITV company was identified, the date and time were not generated dynamically. There was also a generic ORACLE caption occasionally transmitted from London, and it was that that was seen during the prolonged ITV-wide strike of 1978-79 when both programmes and text were off the air.

he ITN pages were now available on a Sunday - and a Bank Holiday weekend to boot! Meanwhile CEEFAX on 2 devoted a whole section to the aestival festival.

or a time, CEEFAX provided a "Latest Page" feature on p190, whereby the last page to be inserted anywhere in the magazine was also placed on p190. This was ideal for shop displays, or keeping up with different sports results, for example.

By 1978 it had been reduced simply to a menu of some of the latest pages, before disappearing completely.

here were grandiose plans proposed for CEEFAX, ORACLE and education, and the new medium was seen as a replacement for the expensive schedules and booklets supplied to schools each term. There were a few pages containing listings and text and simple graphics relating to a few series, and later on, Telesoftware was used to a similar end. However, nothing much survived of the early ideas, though it's worth noting that the BBCi satellite service currently has some pages of GCSE revision material.

roper subtitles linked to programmes were rarely transmitted before 1980, and until then Page 170/270 contained static text which changed on a daily basis, cut into the tv picture, purporting to be "CEEFAX Subtitles". They were never double height, as real subtitles invariably are, and they often exhibited the strange sense of humour peculiar to CEEFAX.

The test card was received from an out-of-area transmitter, hence the snowy picture. Such poor reception often results in incorrect teletext characters, though I think on this occasion the odd spelling of "subtitles" may be due to an ironic sense of humour on the part of the Editor of the Day.

One Christmas CEEFAX transmitted an animated graphical subtitle which depicted the Three Wise Men travelling to Bethlehem. It was shown regularly throughout Christmas Day. CEEFAX used to push the boat out at Christmas, with a fortnight of special features, stories, quizzes and puzzles. Nowadays - nothing special. I suppose it's just a job ruled by bean counters like any other, now.

Subtitles on CEEFAX were demonstrated as early as 1975, but as far as I remember the earliest subtitled programmes (around 1977-79) were as follows:

Carl Orff: Carmina Burana

Malice Aforethought, starring Hywell Bennett

CEEFAX is Here!

Quietly In Switzerland

Blankety Blank

The final subtitle shot shows one of the earliest regular subtitled programmes, from about 1980. It was a Sunday evening BBC1 series about a small charter airline business (not to be confused with the later one starring Roy Marsden made by Yorkshire Television).

The subtitle actually belongs to the previous scene - I "held" it while I was taking the photograph. The white rectangle at top left is where the page number selected by the recently added remote control appears. It was completely unlike the present day page selection - in fact almost entirely opposite. On pressing "page" on the handset, page acquisition was inhibited (and so served as a hold-page function) and the white rectangle appeared, boxed, showing the selected page number, in black, as the next three keys were pressed. When the page was acquired, the number appeared white-on-black as normal, and the box disappeared from the tv picture. All the teletext functions operated in the tv, as well as the text, mode, so it was possible to select pages in the background, and switch to them once they had been captured.

At this stage, I had modified the character generator to give a one-pixel gap between letters instead of three. Comparison with the earlier shots shows how much more legible this was.

smeralda was the name CEEFAX gave to its original computer (though she had a predecessor - a thirty-page core-store that had to be programmed in binary). The one that replaced her early in the 1980s was dubbed Selene. Thereafter presumably they were just called by the letters in the barcode on the cardboard box they came in, as CEEFAX was taken over by News and Current Affairs and the BBC was taken over by a pervading lack of imagination. Nowadays CEEFAX is served from the same faceless machine that generates the schedules, programme ideas and the virtual-reality reality show presenters.

Back in 1978 though, despite the gloom and despondency prevalent at the end of Sunny Jim's reign, CEEFAX managed a Christmas and New Year magazine packed with puzzles, quizzes, stories, humour, competitions and, yes, satire, before it was all outlawed during the subsequent regime of Queen Maggie.

Finally, an oddity from 1991, captured on my BBC Microcomputer with a Morley teletext adaptor. The file was transferred to my Archimedes, and thence via a DOS disc to my Power Mac, where it was converted to a GIF file. Despite the rather circuitous route, I can assure you it hasn't been edited along the way.

My faithful "Beeb" died in the early nineties, and with it went the teletext adaptor. I don't seem to have captured any other teletext pages, and this is the only one I transferred to the Archimedes.