AS the 10th anniversary of its final day falls this weekend, fans of Ceefax are becoming nostalgic for simpler times when, in a pre-internet, pre-rolling news existence, the world’s first teletext information service proved a vital tool for households.

 

Back in the pre-internet day…

…Ceefax was how you kept up-to-date and informed. The text information service, available via TV sets, provided news headlines, sports news, weather and TV listings, to name but a few of its services.

 

It was such a different world?

If you wanted to know the football scores or latest news headlines, you had to nip to the newsagents or wait till the nightly news bulletin. The medium was often the main method of finding out breaking news and results, offering people the ability to connect with world events with more immediacy.

 

What else did it offer?

Other features included chess and racing, music reviews, travel information, jokes and even an alarm clock. At its peak, as many as 600 pages were available.

 

How exactly did it work?

If you are too youthful to recall the black screen with the yellow "Ceefax” against a blue background, it was operated via the numeric and coloured remote control buttons. You could go to page numbers to reach the section of interest to you or quickly hit on the subject matter via the red, green, yellow or blue button.

 

When did it begin?

Back in 1974, having been developed two years earlier by BBC engineers who used a then unknown capacity of a particular TV signal to send information that could overlay a TV picture; with the name a pun on viewers being able to "see facts”. As the popularity of TVs in the home grew, notably with a surge in people renting TV sets, uptake increased until Ceefax soon enjoyed 22 million viewers. The commercial version - on ITV and later C4 - was Oracle, and later Teletext.

 

It all came to an end…?

When the digital switchover was completed on October 23, 2012, it saw the curtain come down on the pioneering service. And now the BBC red button is regarded as the spiritual successor to Ceefax. Meanwhile, videos, both of the dawning of the Ceefax era as documented in a BBC Tomorrow's World episode in 1977, as well as videos playing rolling Ceefax pages from its existence, and also from its final day, are huge hits on YouTube, garnering hundreds of thousands of views.

 

Now?

Ceefax features in a new exhibition held to mark the BBC’s 100th anniversary. “BBC through the decades” takes place at the National Museum of Computing at the historic Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, until November 20, showcasing the analogue and digital technology used by the BBC since it began and the innovations it contributed towards.

 

Fans are nostalgic?

Nostalgia is the mood de jour and one Northern Ireland based computing expert, Nathan Dane, 20, is such a fan, he used his coding skills to make a replica of the service on a server he operates from home. On his www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk website, Ceefax fans can keep up-to-date with today’s news in a retro style.