Ceefax is 35 Years old today!

Ceefax is 35 years old today!
What are your first memories of it?
I first viewed it in 2002 and liked pages such as 'Chatterbox' and 'Gamestation'.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8260196.stm

Where would you be without it. Go on to it for 15 minutes every morning and I know everything in sprort, news entertainment and more.....Heres to another 35!

Good God - 2002?!! I first used Ceefax in about 1985 and even then I got a ribbing at school for my parents only just having got a telly in the house that was capable of receiving it.

Back then there seemed to be all sorts of strange pages to find:
- quizzes using the 'reveal' function that unveiled the answers. You could put this on and pretend you were the quizmaster of a popular programme and put the questions to your little brother revealing the answers to him when the bemused little fellow didn't know the answers to any of them. No ? Just me then...
- community pages full of stuff you never knew you really thought anyone gave a monkeys about
- international flight arrival times for airports across the country (great when you lived in Shropshire)
- "real-time" diagrams of the major motorways rendered in parallel strips of cyan with yellow bits signifying delays and red bits meaning everyone was well screwed and you may as well not bother leaving the house
- a really odd World Clock page, that ticked away showing you the time in Bombay, New York, Paris... fantastic.
- jaunty weather maps made of Mode 7 split graphics with huge areas of the country summed up vaguely as "Mild but with cold intervals, wet with some sun"
- peculiar test cards with blocks and divided-by signs...
- the newsflash page which would disappear once you selected it, then magically re-appear with some report of Union upset at British Leyland during Top of the Pops when your Dad would be attempting to not notice Legs'n'Co. This, hilariously, would cause much confusion and remote control button bushing from said father...
- the endearingly nerdy *CAT magazine pages which you could apparently download into your BBC Micro and get software over the air! (I never got it to work)

Great stuff. I haven't used it in years, but it will be a sad day when they switch it off for good. Simply brilliant BBC R&D.

its was the internet before the internet!

I first "found" Ceefax in 1992 when the main screen looked like this..

http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/ceefax02.gif
(Courtesy of Mike's site at mb21 http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/main1.shtml)

Don't really have many memories of it as I was a Teletext fan, only really used it for the TV & Radio listings back in the day. My father still checks his shares using this on BBC2!

Yes. I've only be using Ceefax for a few years. When I was younger we didn't have a compatible TV with Ceefax/Teletext on it.

That was a bad time for Ceefax. This was after the complete relaunched the it in about 1989. They got rid of anything entertaining (fun and games etc) and all graphics apart from the weather maps and divided it up into 100-page sections. The 400 was Breakfast Ceefax in the mornings and an odd mix of not much else at other times.

They also introduced different editions according to what time it was - the vertical white 'ceefax' on the front page originally said: 'breakfast', 'daytime', 'weekend' etc until the idea was ditched. Teletext did the same thing at launch too, but gave up after a few months too.

It was only after teletext launched over on ITV and C4 that Ceefax chilled out and relaxed their strict layout and content rules introducing the 500 magazine of kids, entertainment etc

They had a section on page 190 (or 290 on BBC2) called 'Miscellany' which had all the odd stuff that didn't fit anywhere else. The A-Z on page 199, engineering announcements on 198, 197 was the Ceefax in Vision etc. A couple of times the 190 pages had a page called something like 'Every Second Counts' which was just the logo of the quiz show of the same name. This was there so they could put the logo up on a teletext TV when it was one of the prizes.

Ceefax had a cartoon strip staring an octopus didn't it?

Love Ceefax and it's associates.

I remember on it's last anniversary a man responsible for it was on Breakfast getting slightly angry after Natasha Kaplinsky said it was old fashioned. Clips were shown of the holy grail that is the Angela Rippon fronted 'This Is Ceefax' that I would dearly love to watch in full!

I was always a Teletext man personally... mostly cause Ceefax doesn't have Bamboozle.

Another thirty-five? You'll be lucky if you get another two.

My first memories of Ceefax were being amazed by it at the house of a friend from primary school, so it must have been around 1981 or 82. No Fastext in those days, but even so, it seemed incredibly high tech that you could get whatever information you wanted whenever you wanted on your TV.

It was also, along with Oracle, the only form of entertainment at my aunt and uncle's house. So whenever we went to visit for the weekend, I read just about every page on both services.

We didn't get a teletext TV at home until 1994. At that point, Ceefax had gone very news based, with most of the fun features gone. It took a few years for them to return.

These days though, I never use it at all - mainly because I never watch analogue TV anymore, and also because I can get all the same information and much more on my mobile much quicker. It's impressive that the teletext system has lasted as long as it has, but it does look very dated now, and is clearly almost at the end of its life.