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

I have fond memories of browsing the football scores on Ceefax as a teenager.

I've missed it ever since we lost it

Mol

I miss it for its retro look. It reminded me of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

When I saw the subject line, I was afraid Ceefax was a researcher I didn't know, and would never get a chance to meet.

In my latter days of having both I noticed that the content of BBCi and Ceefax was more or less identical barring the retro-graphic look of one.
Consequently I'm not sure I really consider it gone. Even many of the page numbers are still the same.

When the internet first started in the mid 90s, one of the earliest sites of any use was a Dutch version of Ceefax - updated live! I thought the technology was amazing.

"This is the future" I told people.

Mainly I'll miss the little subliminal bit of satisfaction I got every time I used it for knowing how it worked and appreciating the sheer ingenuity of the idea. So there are lines of "picture" that we broadcast but that don't get projected onto the screen? Hmm... we could use those for something else... It's proper invention, that.

My main experience of Ceefax was the snow reports. Each year my then g/f and I would look forward to early December when the snow report pages would become active, and start reporting the number of lifts open, number of runs open, depth of snow and last fall in each resort. And we'd check, every day, the report for wherever we'd booked to go. It was all part of the anticipation of our holidays. I loved it.

Won't miss it, though.

There is no h2g2 entry on Ceefax..

...if ever an entry cried out for a non-standard font...

I would have missed it 20 years ago.

But now there's Lolcats!

PP.

"...if ever an entry cried out for a non-standard font..."

...and lots of spelling mistakes.

B

Are you offering to sub it?

I won't miss it now but pre-internet it was my main method of finding out the local weather and news