Tuesday 12 June 2012

Ceefax index page from 3rd April, 1976

 Here's an index page from 3/4/76.  The Eurovision Song Contest was on at the time!

This has been generated from actual line data and has only been manually re-touched in a few places: the header (which was showing the wrong page number and date), the two dashed lines on the right hand side and three spurious characters.  All colours are as the original.

Note the person who typed the page used the letter 'O' rather than the number '0' to reference the page numbers.

Monday 11 June 2012

Early telesoftware (1978)

When you think of telesoftware, you think of mid-80s BBC Micro software broadcast in magazine 7.  However, this wasn't the first telesoftware to be demonstrated.
   
This page describes how a teletext decoder has all of the peripheral parts of a computer (a display and a key pad) and is only missing a CPU in order to become a computer.You added a CPU and voila: a computer on your television.

In 1978, tests were broadcast on ORACLE.  The program starts with $%$%$% (just in case you don't come into the page at subpage 1) and continues from there.

The web page above names a few test programs that were broadcast - the first page of one is shown below.  The data aren't that accurate though - you can see how the header is slightly corrupt, and the data in the page are likely to be just as iffy quality-wise.


Wednesday 6 June 2012

Couldn't resist....

...posting this Ceefax test page from 1976.  Surprisingly this required very little manual retouching - the other pages are mostly awful.  I haven't fixed all the problems though.