Have you ever wanted to go back in time to the 1990s and see what it was like to live before the invention of the internet? Well, now you can because 38 years after the world’s first teletext service was closed down, Ceefax has been recreated for nostalgia buffs by young techie, Nathan Dane , using a live BBC data feed at nathanmediaservices.co.uk/ceefax/ Click on the link to relive the heady days of when we had the “world at our fingertips” – well, three buttons on our telly remotes – and marvel at the simplicity of news served up in brief bullet points of blocky type.
There were no adverts or whizzy videos back then, although the BBC service did make full use of its range of seven colours, and if you were lucky, a cryptic graphic that looked like it was drawn by a three-year-old. When Ceefax began 50 years ago in 1974, our first “information superhighway” stretched to 30 pages. It had even been accidentally discovered by BBC engineers looking for ways to provide subtitles for the deaf when they realised that a normal television picture of 625 lines had spare capacity that could be used to transmit words and numbers – and so Ceefax was literally “see facts”.
In the 1970s, Ceefax was so cutting edge, I first saw it being exhibited at the Science Museum in London – along with other unbelievable space age gadgets of the future, such as tellies that could fit in your pocket. But like many families in Britain, we didn’t even have a TV at home, let alone on.