Date   : Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:52:07 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Teletext

Steve Inglis wrote:
> Ceefax pages are available online at http://www.ceefax.tv/

I remember back in the early '90s we had a system at uni that grabbed the data 
from somewhere and published it on the campus network (possibly made available 
over the entirety of JANET, actually); with a suitable Teletext-capable 
terminal emulator you could point it at the server and read teletext on your 
desktop machine.

Afraid bit-rot's set in over the years and if I knew exactly what the setup 
was then I've forgotten since (I can't quite remember the UI, either - I 
*think* you telnetted to the server and logged in using plain ol' ASCII, then 
kicked the terminal emulator into teletext mode and accessed pages like a 
regular TV - presumably the login shell on the server had enough smarts to 
take numerical keyboard input and cough up the relevant page).

My bastardised Acorn teletext adapter came from that same uni in the mid-90s, 
so it's quite possible it was part of a bank of them (one per TV channel) and 
there was nothing more than a handful of beebs snarfing down teletext data and 
dumping raw pages onto the server - they did quite a bit of local, on-campus 
beeb development work.

cheers

Jules