h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When using it to check the football results, there are usually about 3 or 4 pages of them, and in the top right it will say '3/4' or '1/4' or whatever. Without fail, when you select the results page it will be showing the page AFTER the team that you're interested in. You then have to wait for it to get round to 'your' page again. Teletext can sense this, and will start displaying each page for longer.

Yeah, happens with cinema pages too!

You may know this already, but just in case...

If you're waiting for a sub-page (say, 2/6), then you can hit the 'Time-Page' button and enter the sub-page number (in this case, 0002). Then only that sub-page will get displayed when it's eventually transmitted, and you can go for a coffee without worrying that you'll miss the page!

jd

why can some one tell me does teletext as already mentioned always leave the screen your reading before you manage to read it, but why does it always stay on all the other pages long enough for you to read them twice? And why on mutiple pages does it always start on the page after the one you want? and why oh why does it work so much better on my friends t.v card in his computer than my almost as expencive as his whole computer system t.v!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is it just to wind me up..........is it just a conspiracy against me?

oh and just as a final 2 questions:

1) does any one ever use it for anything more than whats on T.V now and next & football results (or the F1 times in my case?)

2) does anyone ever actually look when a program says there is more information on page 666 or what ever?

There's a very clever computer system in Teletext headquarters.

When you request a page (say, cinema listings), your TV sends back a signal alerting the computer that you want the page, and sends helpful info including your location, hobbies, tastes etc.

That way, if your home town is on sub-page 2, the computer can quickly skip to sending sub-page 3 next, thus ensuring that the advertisers get the full benefit of forcing you to watch 40 sub-pages of irrelevant content.

I believe this system was invented by a man named Professor Sod. His algorithm became so fundamental to many computer systems (it was very useful for automated phone enquiry services) that they named a law after him.

Part of this system has been adapted for the web. If you go to a page, and there's a big block of text you want to read, then the system will insist on grabbing every last bit of an image in which you're not interested, resize the image box on the screen, lovingly repaint the pixels, and rearrange the layout of the page to suit that image, before finally displaying the useful text.

It's good to see that parts of the Teletext system will live on, if only in spirit!

jd