

Ceefax: The early days - colinscape
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20032531

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TapaJob
For those interested, this was a great service too. Early days of investing
and retriving historical data on companies via 4tel's Shares 3000 pages was
the only way for private investors to get data freely!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmjKAM1NVWE>

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matthewowen
Ceefax was a great example of quality sub-editing - every headline was exactly
the same length, but they generally sounded natural and communicated plenty of
information

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robmil
These restrictions fed into the website, too — hence every BBC News article
having a very short lede paragraph.

The headlines' noun-heavy wording also helped spawn the concept of "crash
blossoms" — syntactically ambiguous headlines that had amusing alternate
readings: <http://www.crashblossoms.com/>

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richardjordan
The various teletext services in the UK were a powerful connector in the days
before a consumer internet. Someone up thread mentioned stock information
available to consumers - probably helping contribute to the boom in the
general public owning and trading stocks along with the rash of privatizations
that happened in the 80s.

Buying discounted airline flights and package tours through the TV; classified
listings... all great precursors of online commerce, normalizing it ahead of
the revolution that came with the web.

But the strength of Ceefax in particular, among these services was the written
content. Well written articles on up to days news (often long before other
sources), and sports (instant sports results - an amazing service in its
time), which foreshadowed the great BBC website that eventually followed,
probably teaching institutional skills that carried over.

Ceefax and the commercial teletext competitors represent another example of
where solid government sponsored innovation can have big societal benefits and
provide a roadmap for business to follow.

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davnola
Brings back happy memories of hacking on the BBC Micro.

    
    
        > MODE 7
        > PRINT CHR$(136);"GOODBYE CEEFAX!"

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topbanana
There was a portion of the Ceefax bandwidth given over to downloading BBC
computer programs: [http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Acorn-
Teletext-A...](http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Acorn-Teletext-
Adapter/)

