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Originally Posted by andy
Theclosed caption text mode is just a simple text display that could be used for somthing like a news ticker. Teletext allows you to load pages of information on demand and to link to other pages. You can get things like TV listings, weather reports and airline arrivals.
Go to this page and click on Index. It will open up a window displaying exactly what you see on a teletext TV. You can then interact with it like you can on the TV by clicking on the numbers (normally you type in the number on the remote). Keep in mind that this was around in the early 80's.
http://www.ceefax.tv/ |
Thanks, Andy. I just looked at the ceefax.tv site and saw their teletext pages. Very interesting. Had a bit of trouble getting it to work at first (server reported "object not found"), but the problem was simply that I did not have Java enabled on my computer. Once I enabled Javascript, the pages showed up just as they should.
Ceefax seems to be almost exactly equivalent to the on-screen program guides on today's RCA Guide Plus+ TVs and Motorola digital cable boxes here, except for the news services, which Guide Plus+ and digital cable do not have in their on-screen listings. I believe that teletext could have been extremely useful in this country for just that purpose; it could have provided over-the-air TV viewers with program guides, weather forecasts, etc. years before digital cable.
What kinds or types of programming were on TBS's teletext tests in the early 1980s? Were the tests conducted nationally or only in the metro Atlanta area over Turner's WTBS channel 17? If the latter, that would explain why teletext equipped TVs located anywhere else in this country did not display anything in teletext mode at any time.