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It was done. Teletext delivered news, sports results, horoscopes, closed captions, all directly to your TV in real-time. It was quite clever as a pre-internet method to deliver text content to every home.
All the people in the comments here being unaware of this makes me feel old.
It was not a thing in the places I grew up in. But when I saw it working during a European visit, it blew my mind. That was 20 years ago.
I don’t know how it is in other countries, but at least here in Germany teletext is still a thing and works on all the larger channels.
Yes but
I never said it was good or practical lol
As someone who doesn’t understand german, Devote sklavin für dich. Devote slave for you? And what’s that korperl zuchtingung?
Körperliche Züchtigung:
bodily desiresedit: mistook with süchtig, actually means corporal punishment
Devote Sklavin für dich: you are correct
Fesseln+Knebeln: Bondage+gag
1,99€/Min.v.FN Mobil abw. -w-:No ideaedit: $2.49/min. from landline, mobile varies [ad]This is one of the more SFW pages actually. There are lots of pixelated nudes, as well as a cryptic page of colored rectangles, which you are supposed to scan with an app for the full AR experience and also buy as an NFT?
I didn’t follow any of the links so all I saw was
“Heiße Uschi120+ bringt Dein Rohr ohne Vorspiel zum Glühen”
Wow
For non-German speakers: “Hot Uschi20+ will get your tube red hot without foreplay”.
The phrase „Rohr zum Glühen bringen“ literally means “bring a tube to glow” and originated back when electronics used vacuum tubes. I’m not German so I have no idea how common it is today but I assume this bit is for an old audience.
Great find, I missed that.
This is bringing back memories. I never saw raunchy classifieds like this in Aus though.
This is one of the more SFW ones. You know what, I’ll make an ImageMagick script to crop & aspect-ratio-correct the rest of the ones I took and upload them. Coming soon!
Edit: Imgur album, feel free to report as NSFW lol
- omg, the “SEX SEX SEX” sign is actually flashing
You can also view most German teletext services using their app for some reason
Teletext is a fun art form. Too bad the graphics are only really used for tarot and phone sex ads.
Anyway, here are some of my recreations of Czech cartoon characters using the online editor at edit.tf:
I have more but I am rate limited. Imgur album
It’s at least 30 year old technology. Maybe older.
Yup. I know because I grew up reading magazines with one article or two about it. It was neat to see it in person, though.
The current generation doesn’t even know what a VHS is. I’m sorry, time comes for us all.
My nieces once asked to see my rectangular DVDs…
In their defense when I was a kid I called red dead redemption, GTA cowboys. If kids dont know what to call something theyll figure out an equivalent.
I do. I’ve never seen or touched one, but I know what it is.
Buy one second hand and fiddle with it. Curious machines!
Out-dated and worthless you mean?
There is no need to understand the technology.
Not that tape storage is dead, it is just not relevant anymore.
Who’s saying anything about being relevant. There is no need to smoke cigars or make oil paintings either. Yet people do things that they find interesting regardless of what you think. Interesting, huh?
Don’t worry, I’ve never touched a gas lamp but I know what it is.
Do you mean a VCR? Or A “VHS tape”?
You know what a cassette is. I don’t need to call it a cassette tape do I?
When they were widely used, people called cassette tapes “tapes” (common) or “cassettes” (less common). I don’t recall anyone calling a VHS videotape or VCR “a VHS”.
Similarly, I have seen people recently say “a vinyl”, which wasn’t ever the way it was said. (it would be music “on vinyl” or “a record”).
The only time I have ever in my thirty years of life heard someone refer to a VHS as a “videotape” or “tape” is in the context of “tape that show for me”. It’s always been “Video” or if they’re specifying the format “grab the videotape” or “VHS” a lot like how people today say “DVD”.
I think we’d both agree someone who calls a “DVD” a “DVD Disc” insane and someone who just says “Disc” could mean CD-ROM, Blueray, so forth. It’s too general and I think the same thing applies to “tape”.
Yeah, “video” was common, but “VHS” wasn’t. Maybe kids who developed language as the format was expiring in the early-mid 90s didn’t have lots of examples and just thought the letters printed on the tape were a noun.
It was when both VHS and Betamax was on the market.
Teletext in the Netherlands has an app now. People still use it.
Hey, while it looks like a dog’s breakfast, it is an incredibly low bandwidth solution for such a useful service.
On NY1 they just straight up read the newspaper to you on TV.
There are many radio shows around the world dedicated to reading news articles for print impaired people. Great for when you’re driving as well.
Some places didn’t have that.
Like places in Asia jumped from radio to cable tv to mobile phones, skipping intermediate technologies like tv with only one or two channels, computers etc
That surprises me. Many parts of Asia have a big gambling scene; one of the main uses of Teletext was horse/dog racing odds in real time.
I think they might have been gambling with cards or lottery when teletext was a thing in Europe.
That was the thing in India at least.
Still exists in Sweden, though I haven’t seen it since I was a kid.
I remember this, but I think it was only one local channel here. It would show community events, snow plow schedules, and things like that.
Or was that something else?
There were many pages, I’m not sure if you count that as channels? Then the Teletext for closed captions were tied to the channel you were overlaying on.
It was a thing for most of the world, I just don’t believe it really caught on in the US, it was called teletext and was really widely used.
Can confirm. It was common here in Norway. My dad got most of his news updates and weather forcasts from there, as he was usually busy during the evening news broadcast.
we still have teletext in Ukraine even though noone really uses it. (and also we don’t have analogue tv anymore, but it’s still possible to use them somehow afaik)
there’s even an online version of the most popular one (Intertext) which has a realtime chat feature (you can text a specific number to send your own messages, kinda like discord lol)
http://intertext.com.ua/It’s weird that Noone would travel all the way to Ukraine to really use Teletext. He must love it!
I kind of miss Ceefax, the BBC’s Teletext service. The immediacy meant that headlines were often broken first on Ceefax before TV or radio, but the limitations meant there was little room for overly-verbose fluff. I remember using it in the early nineties for realtime flight arrivals at our local airport, so we knew when to set off to collect my grandparents.
I remember reading about a system used somewhere else in Europe where you would call a phone line and use your phone’s dialpad to navigate the Teletext on your TV - that sounds very clever.
I believe you’re thinking of France’s minitel (wikipedia) . I never used or saw it myself. Living in a neighboring country, i did see quite some adds mentioning it on their tv stations. Trente-six-quinze-minitel! Club Dorothée FTW! :)
“We need a cheery headline for our upbeat vision of a bright future.”
“How about a fuckload of dead people.”
“No, no, it needs something else…”
“They drowned.”
“You may be into something…”
“And we’ll mention some are missing, suggesting that some families will never get closure and will spend the rest of their lives haunted by visions of the nightmare that might have befalled the one they loved.”
“By jove! Brilliant! Okay, now about the videophone picture…”
“How about a wife getting a call about her husband from the coastguard…”
Retrofuturistic cinematic universe
I love how the way you ended it implied that the dude in the picture is not her husband and he’s seemingly now hopeful that the husband is among the 35.
2023: “can we turn it off?”
“Hm — twenty dead and fifteen missing!”
“I could have sworn I killed more…”
—Me, currently finishing up the last missions of Dishonored
Spies sappin meh dirigible!
Me keeping track of Russian casualties
I feel like this image has meme potential.
In Germany we say Teletext
In Denmark it was called text-TV and was an integrated part of every channel, own button on the remote and all. It was retired a few years ago since almost nobody used it anymore…
It’s still available. https://www.dr.dk/cgi-bin/fttv1.exe/100
The content is mostly auto-generated, but it still serves a purpose for showing subtitles.
It’s mostly just another advertising channel for premium phone numbers and bs horoscopes, phone sex lines or bs “surveys” where you txt an expensive number. All the content is autogenerated like weather, sports results or program preview.
Ukrainian one has a phone number you can text to post messages in a global chatroom for around 1cent per message
the chat is still up and full of bisexual men looking for partners for some reasonOkay what the hell is up with folks using obscure commication methods to try to fuck?
On a similare note, there was the remains of an old prototype communication system in the dorms of a nearby college that was removed back in the 70s that was restored recently and for some reason the furries at the college fixed a quarter of it and were hooking up using it.
Yeah in Germany there are sex over phone numbers on the Teletext from every single channel that is not tax sponsored.
Wrong! It’s called Videotext.
Yes, it can indeed be done, it’s called Teletext. But by the time computers with internet showed up, people slowly but surely stopped caring about it.
At least there’s still that red button on my remote that I can press to access some spiritual successor to telete- oh wait, I don’t live in a country that has this.
So I booked a ticket to the UKImagine them pulling it off back then, but without coming up with any scroll function!
And televisions back then were tiny and not great in terms of resolution/clarity.
The solution is called paging. It’s the concept of dividing content into chunks of discrete size, then provide a mechanism to change the currently shown page. The mechanism typically consists of commands such as “next page”, “precious page” and “goto page number.” This system was initially implemented in paper-based media such as books and newspapers.
https://www.svt.se/text-tv/300
Even exists on the internet in Sweden
same in Ukraine lol
http://intertext.com.ua/
or telegram: @IntertextTVbotthere are even phone numbers you can text to post messages on it’s messageboards for a couple of cents(and they’re still up!)
(and they even kinda modernized that by allowing messages to be posted from the Telegram bot too)(… the messages are full of bisexual men looking for partners for some reason…)
On a similar note, television news shows are called “The TV Newspaper” in Danish (TV Avisen).
Ahh, teletext.
An invention way ahead of its times, just like Duck Hunt
Ha! Imagine reading text off a screen. So dumb.
It’s weird how some of these futurists got some of the details right (viewing news on the TV) while missing the obvious (being able to read / select / zoom-in on one article).
Can you imagine how awful it would be to project a newspaper’s front page 1:1 on a TV, then try to read it? Even with a 4k TV the text would be small, and there’s no way you could read it from the couch.
I don’t have to imagine. I was there 3000 years ago. In the early days of the web they saved entire newspaper pages (as printed!) as single image files. You’d have to zoom in and pan around the page to read it. It was absolutely painful.
Sir, today every country has a national anthem. Did they have national anthems 3000 years ago?
I use a 4k television as a monitor for my daily driver. 43” LG UQ8000. So it has 4:4:4 and 60fps at 4k so long as the host supports it over HDMI 2.0. And it’s barely usable at 4k if they don’t, between the lag and the sub pixels, it’s honestly a better experience at 1080p or 1440p cropped.
With 4k, 444, and 60fps, though, It’s not that bad, even without font scaling, except for certain regions due to the contrast ratio/glare (which isn’t that bad, and I’m not trying to limit the glare, either) or due to viewing angle, being so close.
It’s not the highest quality, but it’s a serviceable way for me to have an 8.3 megapixel desktop, and it was like $300 so I’m happy.
Granted it’s also on a standing desk, so I’m pretty close and can get back a little while still being comfortable too.
I remember hooking my desktop up to a large CRT TV to play StarCraft via composite cables with an adapter. But the resolution didn’t work. You couldn’t read shit. Could play but not chat with my friends
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Finally tablets and phones achieved this a little later than expected.
Still prefer my articles written than having someone read it to me. I’m not 5 cheers.
Since we’re mentioning tablets, then I’d say desktops and laptops achieved this a decade earlier.
Those poor bastards had no idea that by the time this would became reality, most of the results on screen would be junk they don’t care to read. News coverage is sold to the highest bidder.
Do you think it was any different back then?
Yes. Definitely yes.
There were some pockets of propaganda, especially during election times, but it’s nothing compared to the continuous avalanche that exists today.
Yeah pre the 24hr a day news cycle
WAY back in the day, news was fucking great. Especially in small towns. Stories would be like “Man takes bicycle trip 80 miles down to Townsville!”
Source: recent Behind the Bastards - The Holy Rollers Sex Club
Yeah, people would be surprised that listicles were a thing in newspapers.
Yellow journalism tho
That was the exception, not the rule though. Thus why a name was coined for it.
