Cory Arcangel is apparently part of the video game art community - a bit more research reveals that he is a bit more well-known than I first thought.
With the Internet and interactive TV set to supersede teletext, the pages of teletext will become history. However some enthusiasts have brought the format to the Internet. Digiworld is one such cult section, which made the transition online from the original 'Digitiser' part of Teletext's service. It seems this is new content formatted in the traditional manner. You can download an archived version of the service which is pretty extensive with over 1,500 pages.
Might be good to get these into a physical format such as index cards or post it notes in order to organise them. May be the case of building these in Illustrator and printing them off.
Silicon Village
Telesoftware was a program for BBC Microcomputers with teletext adaptors. They worked on BBC Basic, a coding software which pretty much allowed for users to create their own teletext style pages. It seems the graphics are a bit more advanced also but the white on black aesthetic remains.
This design, from a German teletext page, makes use of the bold white on red and blue on yellow. Interesting to note that some aesthetic decisions are based on colour contrasts: for example red on yellow might be too much of a clash, whereas yellow on red is deemed to be fine. The blue on red isn't quite working though, and the purple on yellow doesn't show up all that well.
This colour scheme of red on white works better but the blue and red areas are staring to clash once more. Only on teletext could a designer get away with juxtaposing two such strong colours. Pixel mapping, an often underused technique, is also used here to render the Sky Box Office logo.
The above screenshot from Ceefax in 1983 is crowded but that's part of its appeal. Trying to stuff as much information on a page as possible is a trademark of the early teletext transmissions - mainly due to the high cost of having a larger number of pages (£50 per page when Ceefax began).
Another crowded page, this time from the commercial service on Sky. I like this because there's a lot going on at once: aside from the main focus of the page - the weather forecast - there is room for an advertisement and a premium rate phone number and even some index links."As far as I remember, the idea for teletext came out of a Graduate Trainee Study Group (a kind of 'think-tank', when we had time for that sort of thing). The idea was originally for subtitling for the hard-of- hearing. I remember it being said that it would only be viable if the cost per set could be less than about £5.00! At the time, that was about 1/16th of my monthly take-home salary. That was in about 1970, possibly 1971. I still have the file in my office, but unfortunately only the cover, which has been re-used. The contents have long since disappeared."Bob Walker of the BBC, from Teletext Then and Now
Why were the pages so limited in size?Adrian Robson, from Teletext then and Now
One factor was almost certainly the cost of memory. In around 1975 it cost £50 for the amount of memory that held one page, i.e. 40 characters on 24 lines, or around 960 bytes.
The Alarm Clock page - 160 - was updated every minute providing the original intended use for the Time Coded Page function. At the preselected time the ALARM CLOCK graphic would be superimposed onto the picture in a similar way to a newsflash. (These days the TCP function is more commonly used to access a specific sub-page.)From An Evening With Ceefax, Teletext then and Now.
Fastext is a 'relatively new' service which allows the user to navigate the pages of a teletext system quicker than if they were to directly input the page number.
It would seem this combination of the three primary colours and green is a popular colour coding for button interfaces. This aspect of colouring has largely been lost in the web - designers prefer to choose neutral colours, with more vivid hues being used sparingly. Links tend to be a uniform colour to distinguish them from the rest of the page's text, defaulting to navy blue. Body text is invariably dark on a light background though is occasionally light on dark, as in this weblog.
I didn't know this existed until today, when I found the above photo from DGJones on Flickr. Much like the modern digital camera/memory card printer, this was a built in function in special television models that allowed for the user to print off a teletext screen, presumably around photo size.
One of, if not the centrepiece of teletext is the ability to look up television listings. This would seem a natural function, as the service is actually available on the television itself, negating the need for a paper based TV listings magazine. It is one service which has remained whilst others around it are slowly being removed.
In addition, some teletext services provide stories, news, gossip etc. in much the same way that a regular Sunday magazine supplement would, only with content updated more frequently. Ceefax used to have an extensive TV links section with recipes, calls for quiz show contestants and general information on the BBC's programmes. This is largely gone (above right), but a depleted version still exists on page 615. Teletext's TV pages (left) act as a more magazine orientated service with celebrity interviews and television-related stories. There's also a viewer's views page, a seemingly popular section considering the fact traditional teletext is in decline.
There are hundreds of television listings services online. Yahoo!'s provides links to TV clips, a function not possible on teletext. Also present are viewers' opinions. These are much more extensive than the Teletext service, the greater bandwidth allowing for more detailed discussion rather than just a sentence or two. The online format also allows for more visual representations of the television listings, such as the TV grid at Yahoo (right).
Being an online service, Wikipedia naturally has the ability to transmit more content at a faster speed than teletext. Whereas teletext condenses information down to one or two sentence paragraphs, Wikipedia has the space and bandwidth to go into much more detail. Comparisons between teletext and the Simple English Wikipedia can be drawn, however, in their aims to articulate information in as simple terms as possible. The tabloid newspaper could also be placed in the same category, with its vocabulary limited in order to reach as large a reader base as possible. The BBC's Newsround (which is also broadcast on Ceefax) and many teletext services for children's channels utilise a simplified vocabulary to match the language skills of the reader base.
Much like other internet sites and technologies, Wikipedia has continued to grow, almost exponentially, since its creation. A single teletext service, due to bandwidth restrictions, only has the capability to grow to a certain size. Indeed, since 2000 Ceefax and Teletext have been continually downsizing, moving and removing pages from the service. The popularity of teletext, if anything, has declined and these measures are a reaction to this.
A second aim was to look into some of the artists that use teletext as a medium for producing work. Found that this method is much more popular in Europe, where teletext is still a priority. Lektrolab’s user submissions project was a good example of this, with the general public creating their own teletext pages for transmission on Dutch teletext. Enthusiasts extend the reach of the medium by creating home made teletext systems for their website, such as Tarmo Tanilsoo, who uses the web browser as a teletext browsing tool by emulating the format."On analogue teletext you can switch teletext on and off instantly and rapidly scan through stories/ sports scores etc with just one press of a 'fastext' button.One customer who is a bit annoyed at the newer technologies. It might be a case of interactive TV catching up with teletext in the case of speed. Certainly my Freeview box is slow loading and teletext keeps crashing. That never happened on the old, analogue version.
On digital teletext (Freeview) it can take about 15 seconds for the digital text to even appear, then you have to arrow around and press 'OK' to get the category you want, then more arrowing around to select a story then a wait longer than dial-up internet before the story even appears.
Foreign satellite digital channels manage to re-insert the analogue teletext back into the digital transmission. Why can't the UK do that?"
"Another issue is that the "98.5 per cent of the population" can only be achieved "via rooftop aerials", while Section 134 of the Communications Act (2003) sets out the principle "that no person should unreasonably be denied access to an electronic communications network or to electronic communications services".This is taken to mean that everyone has the right to mount a television aerial on their roof."Interesting that this means people can still have analogue aerials even though in a few years' time they will be obsolete. The article continues to mention that HDTV will be the next big technological advancement. I wonder if they will be updating interactive TV for this?
Seefacts.co.uk"Believe it or not, the BBC’s content production system makes you choose a headline of 31-33 characters, which is pretty precise. This is so it can work on Ceefax and mobile phones, as well as the web."When Saturday Comes is a popular football fanzine. This article laments the death of the traditional format, used by fans to keep up to date with the latest scores, pools news and a bunch of other statistical based information:
"The real replacement for football on Ceefax is the kind of round-table you-watch-the-pros-watch-football show available on Sky Sports and the BBC. You know the kind of thing. Gordon McQueen, Paul Walsh and Tony Cottee stare at a TV screen and tell you that Blackburn have just won a free-kick but it’s come to nothing still 0-0 at Ewood Park, Jeff. This is essentially Ceefax, but a crazily over-manned version with a human face."
1981: The Star (right), successor to the Alto, is released, incorporating double-clickable icons, overlapping windows, dialog boxes and a 1024x768 monochrome display.
1984: Computer Research release GEM. It is graphically very similar to the Mac interface. The GEM UI attempted to be a clone of the Macintosh UI of the time. It was nowhere as sophisticated or complete, but it has similar menus, overlapping windows, icons for files and folders, drives on the desktop, drag and drop, exiting apps uses file-quit, and a trash icon. A few noticeable differences: Opening a folder always opens it in the same window rather than a new one, the trash icon is not a real folder, and drive icons must be manually added or removed. However, it was close enough the the Mac UI that Apple sued Digital Research.
1985: Commodore releases the Amiga 1000 with Amiga Workbench (right). When the Amiga was first introduced in 1985 it was far ahead of its time with features such as multiple resolution high-color graphics, stereo sound, and pre-emptive multitasking that made it a great machine for multimedia applications and gaming.
1987: Acorn releases "Arthur" for the Acorn computer, it is the basis for RISC OS. RISC OS 2 and 3 have a similar look, but an improved feel.
Bill Atkinson is a prominent designer and computer programmer, best known for his work on early Mac computers (original Mac system shown left). These are best known for being the first to use Graphical User Interfaces rather than code input interfaces (CLI).
When Atkinson first started at Apple, he, along with his design team, were charged with creating applications for the Macintosh. Working on limited and restricted specifications (up to what computing power could handle at the time), it was suggested that these ought to be miniature metaphors, such as a calculator or a notepad, on the desktop (as with the control panel, right).
Above are some examples of the kind of icon he would create. The GUI layouts Atkinson would help to develop would become the industry standard, setting the benchmark for future developments, eventually used by other systems including the Windows OS.
SourcesOnline questionnaire
I have set up an online questionnaire at the microsite. I will try and get as many people to complete it as possible and examine the results.
Questionnaire
Results page (may contain tests and stupid/obscene answers, I can't find out how to moderate it, so be warned)
Maybe it was inevitable but the Teletext format as was known for many years is not employed by Teletext in their online presence. Even in 1996, there weren't many allusions to the television broadcast format aside from the heading which was the same as the actual logo on Teletext, an example of which is shown right, a Christmas themed version (note the animated GIF format, very popular in the mid 90s).
Above is what Teletext predicted interactive TV to look like. Note the iconic still-pixellated logo which was used by the company at the time. Compare this to the modern website and its new logo, revamped for a post - teletext age:
There are obvious allusions to the web format rather than traditional teletext in the new version. I like the > arrow selection < idea which is a reference to pre-programmed television interfaces and video game selection screens. I am still not sure about the purple gradient background though and would take the old version over the current one.
Just a word about the Microsite. I am using it to test out various ideas with HTML and graphics as well as having a kind of hub for all the information collected in this project. The hope is that some ideas for an interactive interface that could be implemented in the final outcome may arise from this experimentation.
Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, put forward his theory of hardware development in 1965. Basically it states that the number of transistors involved in a chip doubles every two years. Moore actually predicted the future: his theory became a reality with the Intel chip. Maybe this was actually a case of technology using the law to gauge development - in addition, the theory was refined to its current state in 1975. The original prediction was that computer performance would double every 18 months.
Today's featured article on Wikipedia is Donkey Kong, a classic of the coin-op era. The game was released in 1981 at the height of teletext's popularity. In fact, it was the same year that level two text was released and implemented across Europe and America.
The game has since become cross-format, with versions released on many subsequent consoles and arcade machines. Also notable is the game and watch version (shown right) which is something of a cut down version on a hand held games console. This proves that, with effort, it would in fact be possible to transfer a teletext system to a hand held system for people on the move and also, if people cared, to continue the service to more up to date mediums. Maybe an advanced version of the existing one for mobile phones? I'll explore Teletext mobile in a future post.
