Very cool! I spent a lot of my youth navigating Teletext. Also lots of people doesn't seem to realize that Teletext is still alive and updated daily in some European countries like Spain.
It's still hugely popular in the Netherlands, but somewhat ironically mostly viewed through the web or apps. I wrote a simple command line reader scraping the web version: https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt
I wonder how this could pass anyone who's now older than 10 years by. Are there countries that just never had (widespread adoption of) teletext?
Most people probably haven't used or seen teletext in years, but I'd expect people to know what it is anyways because there's cultural references aplenty.
As far as I know, it was never implemented anywhere in the US. I don't think I was aware of its existence until some time in my 20s, and then only because I took an active interest in retro- and unusually constrained computing environments, and their allies such as oldschool information services.
1. AFAIK NTSC doesn’t support it, so North America never had it. There were equivalent standards but not one universal one to unify around.
2. Are there that many cultural references? I’m struggling to think of many that I saw growing up and I’m in my thirties. It existed (and I used it a lot!) but it wasn’t exactly part of the cultural zeitgeist. The internet had already taken over.
I think the only cultural references I see are football-result nostalgia. Quite a few do still crop up though (and even more so, almost every day I get an ad for a Ceefax inspired mug with my team's results on it).
I too have fond memories of using Ceefax for my football news pre-internet - the ones I remember were I think "302" for general football homepage or "310" for Scottish football scores.
21 years old here and this is the first I have seen it. At first after reading the wiki article I assumed they were talking about embedding closed captions in the vblank but I have literally never seen or heard anyone mention that you could create static "pages" over analogue tv.
Kind of off topic: Judging by the title it's another one of these write-ups on how AAPL is the worst anti-competititve monopoly that is using its position to do bad things. Thankfully it's something completely unrelated.
Unless you're familiar with Bad Apple, that is. Sort of a meme, not exactly sure why, I guess the visuals, as far as the song goes I think it's one of the lesser Touhou tracks.
At some point the video became the standard thing to show on weird displays. We mostly have Marcan to thank for that [1], I think.
Kind of like porting Doom to prove that you have code execution on something that you never were meant to have code execution in the first place, but instead to prove you can display full motion video on something that was never meant to display full motion video.
I remember seeing OpenLase after I developed a bunch of laser projector games [1] [2]. I wish I had known about it back then. Python was a huge bottleneck, and I had to come up with workarounds for the GIL and other problems.
That’s very cool and inspirational! I’ve been wanting to do laser projection too. Was your laser projector home built or bought online? If home built, do you have some links describing how to do it? If bought online, do you have a link to where you ordered it from?
That is a feature of the content rather than the technology. The original video was a silhouette piece in black & white: https://youtu.be/G3C-VevI36s
That's also why it has so much presence in the demo scene. It loses very little fidelity when transcribed to different mediums, be it teletext, ascii [1], flip dots [2], or an oscilloscope [3].
