Tuesday 23 December 2014

New features and a complete ORACLE from Christmas Day 1981

To follow on from the previous two posts: below is a link to the complete ORACLE service from Christmas Day 1981.  I've added an index so you will be able to see all pages and not just the referenced ones.

I've added another new feature which allows you to export the binary data (at least the data with the parity bit always set to zero).  If you click on a subpage the page number will highlight in red.  You can then click "Export Selected Pages" and an alert will open containing the binary data for the page.

I export it to a hex editor called HxD, as with this you can display the data as 42 characters per line, which is the two packet control bytes followed by the 40 bytes of teletext data. In other words you can read the page, albeit without the display attributes :-)

If you select multiple sub-pages then they will be concatenated into one file.  There is a limit to the size of the text that can be displayed in an alert window, which (if I remember correctly) is just under four subpages.  So three subpages will be OK but the fourth and subsequent ones will be truncated.

Merry Christmas from me - here's to more archive teletext discoveries next year!

ORACLE, Christmas Day 1981

2 comments:

  1. Another amazing time capsule. Fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

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  2. You've gone dark for a long while. The Internet misses you!

    ReplyDelete