ceefax

2 Articles

Photo of Ceefax on a CRT television

Ceefax: The Original News On Demand

September 30, 2024 by 21 Comments

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.

CEEFAX Lives! (Courtesy Of A Raspberry Pi)

January 7, 2022 by 28 Comments

As analogue TV slides from memory, there’s a facet of it that’s fondly remembered by a band of enthusiasts. Teletext was an electronic viewdata information service digitally encoded in the frame blanking period, and a TV set with a decoder chip would provide access to many pages of news and other services all displayed in the characteristic brightly colored block graphics. It went the way of the dinosaur with the demise of analog TV, but for [Nathan Dane] the flame is kept alive with his own private version of the BBC’s CEEFAX service.

He has a particular enthusiasm for analog TV, and as such has his own in-house channel served by a UHF modulator. He shares with us the story of how he arrived at a teletext service, before writing code to scrape the BBC news and weather websites and populate his modern-day CEEFAX. Behind it all is a Raspberry Pi, with a vbit-pi board injecting the teletext signal onto the video, and raspi-teletext creating the pages from source material derived from a set of custom scraper scripts.

We like this project a lot, because while it’s not the first Pi teletext system we’ve encountered, the use of a scraped live feed makes it one of the most creative.

Thanks [kwikius] for the tip!