Long before we had internet newsfeeds or Twitter, Ceefax delivered up-to-the-minute news right to your television screen. Launched by the BBC in 1974, Ceefax was the world’s first teletext service, offering millions of viewers a mix of news, sports, weather, and entertainment on demand. Fast forward 50 years, and the iconic service is being honored with a special exhibition at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.
At its peak, Ceefax reached over 22 million users. [Ian Morton-Smith], one of Ceefax’s original journalists, remembers the thrill of breaking stories directly to viewers, bypassing scheduled TV bulletins. The teletext interface, with its limited 80-word entries, taught him to be concise, a skill crucial to news writing even today.
We’ve talked about Ceefax in the past, including in 2022 when we explored a project bringing Ceefax back to life using a Raspberry Pi. Prior to that, we delved into its broader influence on early text-based information systems in a 2021 article.
But Ceefax wasn’t just news—it was a global movement toward interactive media, preceding the internet age. Services like Viditel and the French Minitel carried forward the idea of interactive text and graphics on screen.
1974? i wonder what hardware was used. a state of the art 4004? even graphics chips were not invented yet. I really would love to know.
I remember getting a copy of the teletext spec from the BBC, and it has a whole section in there about how to generate the characters for display on the TV screen, because, as you say, there were no graphics chips yet, so they couldn’t just leave that as an exercise for the reader!
You can come a long way with a set of shift registers, clock/pll circuits, glue logic and a character rom. But don’t expect it to be small or cheap. That something happened in 1974, doesn’t mean it was available to everyone and it certainly wasn’t cheap and easy.
There are plenty of things you can do without a microcontroller. I’ve read somewhere that it’s even possible to blink an LED without one.
But seriously now, I do love to see the logic/circuits involved in the early stages of ceefax and teletext.
Wireless world, June 1976.
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Wireless-World/70s/Wireless-World-1976-06.pdf
Wireless world, November 1975.
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Wireless-World/70s/Wireless-World-1975-12.pdf
Sorry the latter is the December issue. Still important, but…
Here’s the November one.
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Wireless-World/70s/Wireless-World-1975-11-S-OCR.pdf
In South Africa this was called Teletext…same thing, just a different name.
UK had Teletext too, one was on the BBC and the other was the commercial upstart Channel 4.