When I was a kid, teletext was one of the coolest features available on the TV. Basically, teletext was the precursor to the internet–a way of broadcasting pages of text containing news and other information across the analog TV signal. In the early 1970s the BBC released its teletext service CEEFAX.
Here’s what a page looked like:
It was amazing. You could share prices or sport scores simply by using your remote control (if you had one). It was, as the tag line suggests, “the world at your fingertips.”
Apparently CEEFAX still runs in places where the BBC hasn’t switched from analog to digital signal–a cultural artifact to be sure.
Jeff Gissing 