Comments

• By jonplackett 2024-04-2011:512 reply

  I have a 6yo daughter and it’s always funny trying to explain old technology to her. Yesterday I was trying to just explain TV shows starting at specific times the of the day and even that seemed insane to her. Equally having to go to a shop to get a song was mind blowing.

  I haven’t had to explain ceefax yet so this will help.

  By beerandt 2024-04-2013:251 reply

  7yod bought an underwater camera from a shop while at the beach. Basically a 35mm disposable inside a sealed clear case.

  Told her it needed film to work which she accepted pretty easily (the store didn't have any).

  A couple days later we find film, I load it.

  She asks how to turn on the screen to take pics...

  The idea of a view finder completely lost her.

  Of course then I had to explain to her how something could even work without batteries, and my wife thought I was teasing.

  She apparently has never bought/ used a camera without a flash. Thought even film needed a battery to work...

  By jonplackett 2024-04-2019:161 reply

  Yeah cameras are a fun one to talk through because at least there’s some fun bits to learn about - tbe idea of film and no batteries somehow now seems MORE like magic than a modern camera with a screen, which is pretty weird.

  Maybe there’s a new saying “Any technology sufficiently ancient is indistinguishable from magic”

  By beerandt 2024-04-2019:36

  I got to see a child-lightbulb look from my wife when I said it's all potential chemical energy stored in a consumable cartridge. One's just much more specialized than the other.

  By dilawar 2024-04-2013:163 reply

  My coworker 4y old son have never seen money exchanged at shops since UPI has become so prevalent in India. He would just pick things at shop and walk. He didn't relate scanning QR codes with exchange.

  I should ask my coworker if he tried explaining physical money to him and how he reacted to the idea.

  By miki123211 2024-04-210:08

  My friend was privy to a situation where a mother tried to explain to her child that they couldn't afford a toy that the child wanted. The child's reaction? "look mom, there's an ATM over there, if you don't have enough money, just go and get some from there!"

  By jonplackett 2024-04-2019:141 reply

  The money thing is really interesting in that my kids don’t have any concept of how much any amount of money is. And if I say I don’t have money for something they just don’t get it because all I ever do is beep my watch on the reader.

  By tialaramex 2024-04-2021:37

  That's interesting, it was about a decade ago now, but at a previous employer we actually went into classrooms to help them teach about money, as part of the social mandate of the corporation (they're a Credit Reference Agency, so, the bad stuff that's going to happen when you're bad at money as an adult is partly their responsibility, they reasoned that they should ensure kids are better prepared, and part of that is sending employees into classrooms to help with this material)

  All the kids we saw were capable, I'd even say surprisingly capable, of understanding the basics of stuff like budgeting. I remember we ran a scenario where they're helping a man to shop for himself and his wife, they're pensioners so they have a very inflexible income and an overspend is going to be a huge problem, and the kids were pretty careful, they understood that just because Mrs Smith likes flowers, if we haven't enough money for flowers after buying the intended groceries we shouldn't buy the flowers, they grasped that the choice isn't going to be "Buy both and it'll work out somehow", and that if you don't buy enough food you'll be hungry and so on. Even if all they were doing was telling us what they thought we expected, that's enough, as adults they won't be executed for going bankrupt, it's just important that's a conscious choice.

• By kimi 2024-04-209:031 reply

  For full trip down nostalgia lane, here is a full BBS that runs on Minitel (that is the same display protocol as Ceefax but bidirectional). https://minitel.retrocampus.com/

  It runs on physical Minitel terminals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aJAwi0FqDo

  By 082349872349872 2024-04-2012:47

  also https://xn--multipli-i1a.fr/en/5-21/objects/minimit (but with 3615 ELIZA in place of 3615 ULLA)

• By jjbinx007 2024-04-208:296 reply

  This is great. Teletext was a big deal in the UK, a lot of people used to book cheap holidays from deals they saw on it. It was where you could check the news, the weather and maybe play a multiple choice quiz or two.

  Happy memories.

  By oneeyedpigeon 2024-04-208:323 reply

  It was the best way of checking the score in a football match, in real time. When there were enough games playing to necessitate pagination, the wait for your team's page to come around added extra tension!

  Also, Bamboozle.

  By fecal_henge 2024-04-2010:58

  At age 8 I realised my Uncle looked like the guy off Bamboozle. We didnt see my Uncle anymore at that point. Now in memory my Uncle looks pixelated and yellow.

  By ta1243 2024-04-2011:541 reply

  Bamboozle was great, it had "hidden" pages with numbers like "4F5" -- normal ceefax numbers were 0-9 because that's what you could enter on your remote control, the hex numbers were only reachable from the "fasttext" red/green/yellow/blue buttons, so it was hard to "cheat", the wrong answer sent you back to the beginning, you couldn't just put the number back

  By alexdbird 2024-04-2019:02

  You could still cheat. It’s not fresh in my memory but the correct page number was distinctive and the incorrect pages did not load instantly, so you could just press all the colours until you saw the right one!

  By petepete 2024-04-2010:54

  Bamboozle and Digitiser were fantastic, we visited most days.

  By arrowsmith 2024-04-209:028 reply

  Am I misremembering or could you play games on Teletext? I feel like I remember playing very primitive and janky videogames on the TV as a child in the 90s, but I might be making that up.

  My clearest memory of Teletext is how slooooow and unreliable it was to load anything. But I sat it out and waited. Compare that to now where if your website takes an extra second to load then you can lose like half your traffic. Everybody was much more patient with technology back then.

  By larschdk 2024-04-209:08

  They had bingo games running on Teletext in Denmark.

  There were also interactive pages where you could phone in and press numbers to access a much larger set of information. You'd get your own temporary page number (that anyone could technically see), and the teletext broadcast equipment would insert your updated page into the stream when you pressed a number.

  By bartread 2024-04-209:461 reply

  There were definitely puzzles, quizzes, and jokes. You could reveal the answers by pressing the "Reveal" button on your TV remote. I don't remember games per se.

  By arrowsmith 2024-04-2010:08

  That might be what I'm hazily remembering.

  By actionfromafar 2024-04-209:18

  The expensive TV sets cached the previous page, so you could flip between them. The really expensive sets cached ALL pages.

  By DoubleGlazing 2024-04-2014:34

  Sky did a thing in the 90s called Intertext.

  You would dial a premium rate number and you would then be read out a page number. You went to that page and used your telephone keypad to do interactive stuff and the page would update in near real time. The two biggest things were managing your Sky fantasy football team and banking from the Co-operative bank.

  Our TV had a function to let you see all active page numbers so I would often go and spy on what other people were doing.

  By thom 2024-04-2012:34

  There were occasionally multiple-choice adventures using the colour buttons. I must say as much as the slowness is annoying in hindsight, I still have memories of how exciting it was waiting for your team's football score to page back into view, and the thrill of seeing your team had scored.

  By rwmj 2024-04-209:09

  http://www.ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Bamboozle%21 was one.

  There was a short period where you could download games from Ceefax, although it required special hardware.

  By rkachowski 2024-04-209:42

  I remember channel 4 had "bamboozle" - a basic janky quiz game - on their Teletext service, it was a daily adventure between friends to solve each day.

  By TazeTSchnitzel 2024-04-2022:09

  Once digital TV was a thing in the 2000's there were definitely games via the Red Button on Freeview.

  By RowanH 2024-04-209:08

  Kiwi checking in - was a thing here as well.

  Blows my mind what we all do now would have been absolute voodoo magic by comparison.

  If we had gone back in a time machine and shown HDR 4k video upload, available to stream all around the world off peoples phones, live chat alongside, across devices / platforms.

  I think they would have an aneurysm.

  By vmilner 2024-04-2020:10

  I used to check the live world snooker championship scores on teletext in the 80s (when the BBC didn’t show it all live) Now skipping between it on iPlayer and hacker news in my phone…

  By VBprogrammer 2024-04-2014:222 reply

  We once got flights to Florida from Glasgow for £49 fly drive off of Teletext. Booked it Tuesday and flew out on Thursday. Those where the days!

  By qingcharles 2024-04-2020:06

  I think everyone in the UK in the 80s and 90s were taking those crazy trips to NYC and Orlando from Teletext. You'd check every day to see how insane the prices had got. I remember people going to just fill suitcases with things like Levi's jeans which were massively over-priced in Europe.

  By switch007 2024-04-2017:33

  I thought all those were bait and switch. That's cool!

  By datascienced 2024-04-2012:23

  That got me in Tenerife!