Unfortunately no, we missed this important piece of technology
Not really though. In Europe teletext was very prominent (and is still available today, at least here in Germany). It’s basically a newspaper on the TV.
Now, the only person I know who still uses it is my granddad who wishes nothing more than for the internet to be more like the teletext.
It’s also still a thing in Sweden too. Nowadays it can be viewed from a website or an app. There’s even CLI clients so you can view “text tv” on the command line: https://github.com/voidcase/txtv
My granddads problem is rather, that it’s impossible to use the internet without sending data to the internet while the teletext is downstream only.
If people were willing to make content with just text it could be done with plain old HTML and HTTP. W3C is not pointing a gun at anyone’s head and forcing them to write 100MB of JavaScript for every page. Having a new protocol just increases the barrier to a text-first internet.
There are apps that show teletext which, acording to some, are quite popular. It does somehow fit into a retro scifi aesthetic too if one’s into that kind of thing 😄
Back in the day, I had an application that could decode teletext from a TV capture card. And there are PC based DTV receivers that can also do that.
And over here in Finland, the national public broadcaster has the teletext on web. (Yle is the last network to put any effort in teletext - the commercial channels like MTV3 and Nelonen used to have a whole bunch of teletext stuff like premium SMS based chats, but those aren’t really all that profitable these days. I think MTV3 still has that, but they’re shutting it down next year.)
Insert plug for !teletext@fedia.io
Those poor bastards had no idea that by the time this would became reality, most of the results on screen would be junk they don’t care to read. News coverage is sold to the highest bidder.
Yes. Definitely yes.
There were some pockets of propaganda, especially during election times, but it’s nothing compared to the continuous avalanche that exists today.
WAY back in the day, news was fucking great. Especially in small towns. Stories would be like “Man takes bicycle trip 80 miles down to Townsville!”
Source: recent Behind the Bastards - The Holy Rollers Sex Club
It’s weird how some of these futurists got some of the details right (viewing news on the TV) while missing the obvious (being able to read / select / zoom-in on one article).
Can you imagine how awful it would be to project a newspaper’s front page 1:1 on a TV, then try to read it? Even with a 4k TV the text would be small, and there’s no way you could read it from the couch.
I use a 4k television as a monitor for my daily driver. 43” LG UQ8000. So it has 4:4:4 and 60fps at 4k so long as the host supports it over HDMI 2.0. And it’s barely usable at 4k if they don’t, between the lag and the sub pixels, it’s honestly a better experience at 1080p or 1440p cropped.
With 4k, 444, and 60fps, though, It’s not that bad, even without font scaling, except for certain regions due to the contrast ratio/glare (which isn’t that bad, and I’m not trying to limit the glare, either) or due to viewing angle, being so close.
It’s not the highest quality, but it’s a serviceable way for me to have an 8.3 megapixel desktop, and it was like $300 so I’m happy.
Granted it’s also on a standing desk, so I’m pretty close and can get back a little while still being comfortable too.
I don’t have to imagine. I was there 3000 years ago. In the early days of the web they saved entire newspaper pages (as printed!) as single image files. You’d have to zoom in and pan around the page to read it. It was absolutely painful.
“Hm — twenty dead and fifteen missing!”
https://www.svt.se/text-tv/300
Even exists on the internet in Sweden
same in Ukraine lol
http://intertext.com.ua/
or telegram: @IntertextTVbot
there are even phone numbers you can text to post messages on it’s messageboards for a couple of cents(and they’re still up!)
(and they even kinda modernized that by allowing messages to be posted from the Telegram bot too)
(… the messages are full of bisexual men looking for partners for some reason…)
