The end

"Ashley Booth" wrote:

I built the Wireless World teletext decoder - full of TTL and used an
ultrasonic remote, IIRC

So did I, using cheap bargain-bags of rejected part-working chips.
I spent so many hours on it that it took great strength of mind to
dump it eventually.
--
Dave W

"Paul Ratcliffe" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:03:19 +0000 (UTC), Silk wrote:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/11023364/1350989713506.jpg

It was a hopeless pile of crap in the 70s.

No it wasn't.

I can believe it made it as far as 1980, let alone 2012.

So easy to slag things out with the benefit of hindsight.

I remember when it first Came out. I was a kid and the local TV shop had
it
on demo via a kind of STB. It took ****ing ages to load a page, so I got
bored and went and bought some sweets. I went back in the shop after
getting through a quarter of strawberry Bon bons just as the page loaded.

Typical exaggerated comment from a miserable ignorant muppet like you.
It was actually very quick in the early days as there weren't that many
pages on it. It obviously slowed down the more stuff that was put on -
even
then, top wait was probably about 45 seconds.
The real problem was the miserable 1 page buffer TV manufacturers put
into their products. Even when RAM capacities went up and prices came down
they allowed you 4 (1KB) pages, if you were lucky. You should have been
able to cache the whole magazine with much less than 1MB in 45 secs.
Totally pathetic.


It did improve with the introduction of Fastext.

On 25/10/2012 19:56, Rick wrote:
Typical exaggerated comment from a miserable ignorant muppet like you.
It was actually very quick in the early days as there weren't that many
pages on it. It obviously slowed down the more stuff that was put on -
even
then, top wait was probably about 45 seconds.
The real problem was the miserable 1 page buffer TV manufacturers put
into their products. Even when RAM capacities went up and prices came
down
they allowed you 4 (1KB) pages, if you were lucky. You should have been
able to cache the whole magazine with much less than 1MB in 45 secs.
Totally pathetic.


It did improve with the introduction of Fastext.



Some time in the last millenium I wrote an app for an integrated PC-TV
for teletext. Cached the whole magazine, and across channels too. The
annoying bit IIRC was guessing how many subpages there were for any
given page - but once cached access was instant. It would have been so
easy for late model TVs.

Andy

charles wrote:
In article ,
Ashley Booth wrote:
Martin wrote:

On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:03:19 +0000 (UTC), Silk wrote:

Bill Wright wrote:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/11023364/1350989713506.jpg

It was a hopeless pile of crap in the 70s. I can believe it made it
as far as 1980, let alone 2012.

I remember when it first Came out. I was a kid and the local TV
shop had it on demo via a kind of STB. It took ****ing ages to load
a page, so I got bored and went and bought some sweets. I went back
in the shop after getting through a quarter of strawberry Bon bons
just as the page loaded.

... to find that JFK had been assassinated.

I built the Wireless World teletext decoder - full of TTL and used an
ultrasonic remote, IIRC

I built the PW FM tuner - that dates me.


It's about the only thing that would. ;-)

In article ,
Silk wrote:
charles wrote:
In article ,
Ashley Booth wrote:
Martin wrote:

On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:03:19 +0000 (UTC), Silk wrote:

Bill Wright wrote:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/11023364/1350989713506.jpg

It was a hopeless pile of crap in the 70s. I can believe it made it
as far as 1980, let alone 2012.

I remember when it first Came out. I was a kid and the local TV
shop had it on demo via a kind of STB. It took ****ing ages to load
a page, so I got bored and went and bought some sweets. I went back
in the shop after getting through a quarter of strawberry Bon bons
just as the page loaded.

... to find that JFK had been assassinated.

I built the Wireless World teletext decoder - full of TTL and used an
ultrasonic remote, IIRC

I built the PW FM tuner - that dates me.


It's about the only thing that would. ;-)

how kind ;-)

--
From KT24

Using a RISC OS computer running v5.18

On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 20:01:36 +0100, Mike Tomlinson
wrote:

En el artículo , T i m
escribió:

I've never really used any of the Teletext services apart from
downloading programs onto my Spectrum (OTA do they call it). ;-)

Did you build the little photosensor widget that downloaded programs
into the Speccy via a flashing block on the screen?

Erm, that rings a bell but I don't think so.

Worked surprisingly
well.

I downloaded loads of stuff from Teletext using the Acorn teletext
adapter on my BBC micro :-)

Yeah, that sounds more like the sorta thing I had with the Spectrum.

It was a bit like night fishing. You would set it up, go to bed and
see what you had caught in the morning. ;-)

And you only forgot to save it before wobbling the RAMpack once ..

Cheers, T i m

On Thu, 25 Oct 2012 03:54:11 -0500, "Ashley Booth"
wrote:

Martin wrote:

On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:03:19 +0000 (UTC), Silk wrote:

Bill Wright wrote:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/11023364/1350989713506.jpg

It was a hopeless pile of crap in the 70s. I can believe it made it
as far as 1980, let alone 2012.

I remember when it first Came out. I was a kid and the local TV
shop had it on demo via a kind of STB. It took ****ing ages to load
a page, so I got bored and went and bought some sweets. I went back
in the shop after getting through a quarter of strawberry Bon bons
just as the page loaded.

... to find that JFK had been assassinated.

I built the Wireless World teletext decoder - full of TTL and used an
ultrasonic remote, IIRC

I only binned mine recently. The remote used a PCB panel instead of
switches - it never worked properly. Your fingers were either too dry
or too wet.

On Wednesday, 24 October 2012 21:23:25 UTC+1, Max Demian wrote:

I can still get teletext pages from my opera LaserDiscs.



--

Max Demian

Had a Prestel system running at a printing trade exhibition in 1980 running on an Incoterm 20/20 (I think that is what it was). System fed about 6 radio rentals tvs. It kept crashing , so we had to man the system ready to reboot for the whole 10 days. It was only afterwards that we found the bug that crashed it after a certain numbers of pages had been viewed!

John

On Thursday, October 25, 2012 7:55:44 PM UTC+1, Rick wrote:
"Paul Ratcliffe" wrote in message ...
The real problem was the miserable 1 page buffer TV manufacturers put
into their products. Even when RAM capacities went up and prices came down
they allowed you 4 (1KB) pages, if you were lucky. You should have been
able to cache the whole magazine with much less than 1MB in 45 secs.
Totally pathetic.
It did improve with the introduction of Fastext.

They did get around to buffering the lot in the age of the dual standard analogue/digital tuners, but then we were using the digital service instead which didn't buffer anything and was as cumbersome as hell, so at that point it was always easier to switch on the computer.

In article ,
lid says...


Some time in the last millenium I wrote an app for an integrated PC-TV
for teletext. Cached the whole magazine ...

I experimented with doing that for Ceefax using a BBC B Micro!

Obviously it would have needed a lot of memory to actually cache the
pages, so I only kept a record of the page and subpage numbers, a flag
to denote if the page had been received correctly and the the CRC (so I
could tell if a page had been updated).

The annoying bit IIRC was guessing how many subpages there were for
any given page ...

Yes! I kept note of previous and next pages with each page record and
put subpages into dummy magazines 9 - F. While the database was building
initially, if I got a subpage 7, for example, I would set up place
markers for subpages 2-6 as well, then modify the links if a subpage 8
turned up later, and so on.

It worked well except for a massive number of subpages that didn't
exist! For lots of pages, as they were added to, the BBC didn't know
how many there would eventually be, so that had a habit of numbering the
headers 1, 2 , 3, etc, 56!

Why it was always 56, I don't know but usually 50 or more of them didn't
exist!

I did get it working quite well and, as I displayed each page on the
screen as it was downloaded, although I then threw it away when the next
one arrived, it would rapidly flick through random pages when first
switched on, then gradually slow down as the database stabilised until,
eventually, I could spot every update as it happened!

--

Terry