Teletext Ceefax.

[Hamble]

Apparently some people miss it.

Any pangs of nostalgia?

[Mr Saxon]

I remember the days of Teletext, BBC Ceefax and ITV's Oracle later adapted to Channel 4 whose pages started from 400 onwards.
Many a Saturday afternoon spent keeping track of the football scores.
Now I've got Score on the BBC red button service.

[Hamble]

I remember the days of Teletext, BBC Ceefax and ITV's Oracle later adapted to Channel 4 whose pages started from 400 onwards.
Many a Saturday afternoon spent keeping track of the football scores.
Now I've got Score on the BBC red button service.

Can you still remember the page numbers like Mr Hamble?

[Mr Saxon]

Can you still remember the page numbers like Mr Hamble?

TV pages were 110 / 410 on Oracle
Weather index was 160
Newsflash was 150 and a little box used to pop up in the bottom middle of the screen, Sport was 130 and Football was 140

[Hamble]

TV pages were 110 / 410 on Oracle
Weather index was 160
Newsflash was 150 and a little box used to pop up in the bottom middle of the screen, Sport was 130 and Football was 140

2012
Quote...…."It will be a source of minor sadness for anybody who came to rely on that discreet but authoritative presence during those analogue years when, pre-rolling news, TV text had an absolute monopoly on these things. It was all so beautifully simple. Ceefax came in three formats. There. Not there. Or the upsetting and unnecessary "mix", which produced a horrible melding of overlaid text and TV pictures, based around an idea that it might be agreeable to "watch" Ceefax and moving pictures simultaneously, creating a kind of nightmare cyborg world of spectral floating league tables and walking babbling human beings, faces obscured by phrases like "Swindon Town" and "Michael Atherton", first unwitting victims of some strangulating football text-based robot dawn.

Above all Ceefax was brilliant for sport. Even in death its page numbers remain horribly vital. Page 302 – a familiar spasm of finger and thumb – was football headlines. This was the real heart of Ceefax. Page 300 was always technically the sport home page, but there was something a little too diffuse and scattered about it, where the real strength of Ceefax was its remorseless focus. Page 324 was league tables. 316 was scores. 312, my thumb and finger want to tell me, was news in brief. Page 340 was the gateway to cricket, where my own favourite Ceefax memory was spent watching the numbers slowly flicker past as Brian Lara scored the last 200 runs of his world record 501 not out against Durham in 1994, an experience that ended with hugs and handshakes around the room, a sense of binding shared achievement, of really having seen the refresh function on page 347 through those difficult final overs. I saw the Lara 501 moment again later on TV: a roly-poly part-time early-evening half-volley thrashed through the covers to scattered whoops from the ground staff It was, frankly, no competition.

Beyond this Ceefax was an example of genuine technical ingenuity, a BBC invention devised in the early 1970s by Corporation engineers in Surrey who found a way of sending information encrypted within the ordinary analogue TV signal. The Ceefax service was officially launched in June 1974, broadcast through a mini-computer known as "Esmerelda".

And for a while it was Ceefax fever out there, the miracle of man-made electric TV-words driving a nationwide upgrading of TV sets along the lines of the recent flat-screen rush. In October 1981 the government announced the first – and, it turns out, only – National Teletext Month, as the British model for TV text services was rolled out around the world.

Mainly Ceefax was that vanished thing, a voice of quiet authority: entirely straight, irreproachably trustworthy, even its name – "see facts" – devoid of all frippery. Ceefax had no side to it. Not only was its prose furiously disciplined, it was also entirely free of vanity. And in this it was, pertinently, an emblem of the BBC at its best.


Ceefax had no byline picture. It had no angle to work, no cloud of nuanced personal ambition. Even in death there will be no Ceefax sex scandal. Ceefax did not have a caravan. Ceefax didn't want to feel you up. Ceefax wouldn't come jangling and panting and scrabbling at your door after lights out. In fact Ceefax had no interest in you at all. And this was the real nub, perhaps even its greatest distinction: it was courteously and brusquely non-interactive, unscarred by the current urge to embellish all – Have your shout! Speak your spume! Tell Us what YOU think even if it is essentially INANE and imitative MEWLING! – with the legitimising babble of transient public opinion.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/bl.../26/ceefax-bbc

[whiplash]

I still have a cassette machine.

[Blackrock]

I still have a cassette machine.

Likewise, and a turntable for playing vinyl You can't beat the nostalgia of it all.

[Nick2]

Likewise, and a turntable for playing vinyl You can't beat the nostalgia of it all.

My son is a "vinyl" tragic and looks after his collection meticulously. He has a top of the range stereo system and claims the sound from his vinyl is superior to cds. At my age I can't tell the difference.