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

Teletext art, ORACLE, Christmas Day 1981

ITV, Christmas Day 1981

By chance the next Betamax out of the pile was the one that contained the back-end of It'll Be Alright on the Night 3 from Christmas Day 1981.  "If you're one of those people" who likes old teletext, read on...

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The web stylesheets don't support held graphics, which is why we have black blocks separating the colours on the map.  Changes of mode (e.g. colour) require a control character, which was displayed as a black block.  Hold graphics allowed you to change mode and in the place of the black block you got the graphic character of the preceding character on the line.

You can't beat a Bond film after a big Christmas day lunch!

And here's the weather in ATV land

There was the customary 'review of the year'

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A rather nice festive index page

The graphics team are doing a bang-up job for Christmas!

Who needs 160 characters when you have 39?

Transmitter news now

Not sure what he's got to do with recipes, but never mind

Scary!

More pink than I can take at this time in a morning

ORACLE was quite London-centric in 1981

 I found a page with lots of full-screen graphics; I'll post that later in a separate blog!