Date   : Sat, 11 Sep 2004 18:53:46 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: CEEFAX short story contest

On Sat, 2004-09-11 at 16:27 +0100, Greg Cook wrote:
> I noticed the BBC is holding a short story contest to celebrate the
> 30th anniversary of CEEFAX.  Details are on BBC1 page 149. In summary,
> entries must be titled "1974",

Hmm, anyone know what the original server-side hardware as used by the
BBC was? I still have a pet project to get a real service up and running
at the museum (and if a phone exchange can be simulated, then it's not
like we don't have plenty of old modem hardware lying around - acoustic
coupler, anyone?)

> Sorry there's no link; I was sure there was a gateway somewhere to read
> live Ceefax pages over the Web, does anybody know of one?

Can't help there - but it did jog my memory that I did once use a
program called 'pip' to display ceefax pages on a terminal with suitable
capabilities via my uni's campus network. I have no idea what the
server-side setup was - whether it was a teletext adapter bodged onto
something, or whether pages were delived over the 'net (wouldn't have
been www back then that's for sure :)

Response was instantaneous anyway, so pages were certainly cached
locally by something.

Funnily enough my teletext adapter came from that campus, sometime after
the service was pulled (due to copyright issues I heard). Could well
have been the very equipment which delivered the data I suppose! (Along
with the ARM Evaluation Kit I found in the bin at around the same time,
it was what got me started collecting Acorn stuff...)

seeya,

Jules