Welcome, teletext fanatics! I'll just leave this here...

Friday 27 April 2007

An Evening with PText

http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/cabsat/ptext/

The teletext then and now website offers the chance to have an 'Evening with PText', Paramount television's resident teletext service. For archive's sake, the links on the left are all the pages on that channel's broadcasting range. There are about 100 and they can all be navigated by a simple point and click menu system using JPEGs and links within the browser. It would seem that here there is a small problem with loading the links - either Firefox does not render it or the image has been lost. However apart from this, the menu system is a simple way of emulating the teletext menu on a computer system viewable by any browser.

The page in the thumbnail to the right is an explanation of a functionality that can be activated by the remote control. This is yet another practical use of the technology that acts like a kind of digital alarm clock. It can be seen as a primitive precursor to favourite channels on your television set-top box.

Personally I've never used this function before and wondered how it actually worked up until now. Perhaps it's one of those things that not many people use, but it is there nonetheless.

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