Thursday, September 26, 2002

Ooops! Managed to delete my post on Ceefax.

If I can remember what it was all about....

Yes, I don;t watch much TV these days. Mainly sport and even that doesn;t enthuse me that much. Most of the good stuff has been gobbled up by satellite (I hate Murdoch). [Aside: I think I said something about only five UK channels here, nit like the States where in many places you get 10 or more terrestial channels.]

But, I am glad to see that Ceefax is still going. What is Ceefax, you ask? Well, if you don;t live in the Uk you may not ahve come across this old fashioned text service which provides news, weather, sport and other information. I think it uses a sideband of the broadcast frequency. it allows the channels to pump out a crude text service. It;s sort of interactive in that you use the four colour buttons on your remote to move between pages or make other selections. It's dead clunky - think Spectrum ZX. And, you can only get a certain amount of charcters on a page. So the drafting of pages is a real art, especially when it comes to doing clever stuff like pictures - big pixels! - and maps or tables.

I'm a bit surpised that youthe channels still do ceefax as it must be costly to retain all those people who create and upload the pages. But, glad they do. Me for one I still dig those daily Ceefax quizzes.

Any more Ceefax stories out there?

:: Posted by pete @ 07:51