That old Ceefax logo has been seen as late as 1999 when the whole service went down. I believe there's a screen grab on Teletext Now and Then website on mb21.
Yes, that's where I got it from actually, hence the credit to Mike Brown!
I guess if a fault is very major it may not be possible to generate such a caption
No...this caption should cater for such situations. AFAIK, the caption is stored on a chip and is totally independent of the main Ceefax service.
Incidentally, the ORACLE service did generate apology pages in the 100-199 range (200-299 for the regional service) when it went down. Not quite sure how they were generated.
That old Ceefax logo has been seen as late as 1999 when the whole service went down. I believe there's a screen grab on Teletext Now and Then website on mb21.
Yes, that's where I got it from actually, hence the credit to Mike Brown!
But you were referring to the one based in the early 90's where as I was just saying that they were using the logo as late as 1999 and there is a further screen grab along with the one shown in this thread on Mike's site.
When ORACLE use to lose it's service, did they just revert to the clock cracker. I don't seem to remember them having an apology page as such.
I never did work out what the clock cracker actually meant in the end!
IIIRC there is an explanation of the clock cracker on Mike page.
Basically the square and the - are the characters that require the most data to produce (presumably made up of all 1's or have the highest hex value) so a page of them is the most difficult to broadcast and produce. So it is used for testing - if the reciever can produce the clock cracker page it can produce anything
I thought the clock cracker had something to do with the old Timer page system that teletext used to use (when you input a time into your remote and a page number and it switches to that page at the given time)... obviously not!
That old Ceefax logo has been seen as late as 1999 when the whole service went down. I believe there's a screen grab on Teletext Now and Then website on mb21.
I have seen that message old logo 'n all as recently as Summer 2003 on BBC 2 during Learning Zone. I suppose the number of times Ceefax is lost are so few now there is no point in updating the caption
Well they haven't had a new look on Ceefax for about 8 years anyway, I think it's time they did, but they're probably concentrating on their digital ventures more these days...
What will become of Room 7540 at TVC once Ceefax goes?