It was done. Teletext delivered news, sports results, horoscopes, closed captions, all directly to your TV in real-time. It was quite clever as a pre-internet method to deliver text content to every home.
All the people in the comments here being unaware of this makes me feel old.
It was not a thing in the places I grew up in. But when I saw it working during a European visit, it blew my mind. That was 20 years ago.
I don’t know how it is in other countries, but at least here in Germany teletext is still a thing and works on all the larger channels.
Teletext is a fun art form. Too bad the graphics are only really used for tarot and phone sex ads.
Anyway, here are some of my recreations of Czech cartoon characters using the online editor at edit.tf:
I have more but I am rate limited. Imgur album
The current generation doesn’t even know what a VHS is. I’m sorry, time comes for us all.
You know what a cassette is. I don’t need to call it a cassette tape do I?
Some places didn’t have that.
Like places in Asia jumped from radio to cable tv to mobile phones, skipping intermediate technologies like tv with only one or two channels, computers etc
That surprises me. Many parts of Asia have a big gambling scene; one of the main uses of Teletext was horse/dog racing odds in real time.
I think they might have been gambling with cards or lottery when teletext was a thing in Europe.
That was the thing in India at least.
I remember this, but I think it was only one local channel here. It would show community events, snow plow schedules, and things like that.
Or was that something else?
It was a thing for most of the world, I just don’t believe it really caught on in the US, it was called teletext and was really widely used.
we still have teletext in Ukraine even though noone really uses it. (and also we don’t have analogue tv anymore, but it’s still possible to use them somehow afaik)
there’s even an online version of the most popular one (Intertext) which has a realtime chat feature (you can text a specific number to send your own messages, kinda like discord lol)
http://intertext.com.ua/
I kind of miss Ceefax, the BBC’s Teletext service. The immediacy meant that headlines were often broken first on Ceefax before TV or radio, but the limitations meant there was little room for overly-verbose fluff. I remember using it in the early nineties for realtime flight arrivals at our local airport, so we knew when to set off to collect my grandparents.
I remember reading about a system used somewhere else in Europe where you would call a phone line and use your phone’s dialpad to navigate the Teletext on your TV - that sounds very clever.
I believe you’re thinking of France’s minitel (wikipedia) . I never used or saw it myself. Living in a neighboring country, i did see quite some adds mentioning it on their tv stations. Trente-six-quinze-minitel! Club Dorothée FTW! :)
“We need a cheery headline for our upbeat vision of a bright future.”
“How about a fuckload of dead people.”
“No, no, it needs something else…”
“They drowned.”
“You may be into something…”
“And we’ll mention some are missing, suggesting that some families will never get closure and will spend the rest of their lives haunted by visions of the nightmare that might have befalled the one they loved.”
“By jove! Brilliant! Okay, now about the videophone picture…”
“How about a wife getting a call about her husband from the coastguard…”
2023: “can we turn it off?”
“Hm — twenty dead and fifteen missing!”
