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

Teletext is encoded in standard ASCII, but with some "special" characters added which are used to draw crude graphics.

It also has 16 colours, which are the 8 standard colours and 8 flashing colours, where the colour is inverted on each flash...
..and anyone with a BBC Micro gathering dust in their attic and fond memories of "Mode 7" will tell you

I thought Teletext used ANSI, like those old BBS door games?

Note to self dust off old BBC and check it out. All 64k of it.

A massive 64K - I take it this is a model B then
Mine is now defunct - but was particularily good in that it had the ROMs so arranged that you had to go through the word processor and quit it before you got to the operating system...and the user manual had a circuit diagram in the appendix!
If only PCs were like this

Oh yeah I'd the B. I also have a old Sinclair ZX80 somewhere. I have the felling my dad took it to school for his IT museum.

I bought a Master (with 128k RAM (I think?)) around 1987 for £400, used it to get through my A levels and then left it in a box for years.

It still worked (with the original battery ROM battery!) 5 years ago when I sold it to a collector - for £400!
What's all this talk about depreciation?
Cheers,
Lee

That's what is known as gaining antique value.

My mother bought a second hand treadle sewing machine in 1928 for 5 pounds,and used it to make her trousseau and everything else for our family (including an overcoat for my father) until 1952 when my father put an electric motor on it (also cost 5 pounds) They sold the iron work treadle for 15 and when Mum retired in 1965 her workmates bought her a new machine so she sold the old one for another 15 pounds. It could do only straight stitch and only in one direction. Now get back to teletext from here!

Sewing machines stitch,
a stitch in time saves nine,
nine holes are half a golf course.
(erm) half the letters in "a golf course" are in the word "Oracle"
Oracle was the ITV version of Teletext's trademark name

so there, tenuously back...do I win a prize?

Great well done.

Talking about halfs. I need to get to an off licence tonight. Tomorrow is extremly dry here in Ireland.

Trivia...

Oracle was indeed the ITV version of Teletext.

However, until 01 Jan 1993, 'teletext' was just the generic name of the whole system. On that date, Teletext (the company) took over the franchise from Oracle.

That was the same date that the ITV companies changed (e.g. Thames TV lost the London weekday franchise, and TV-am lost breakfast TV).

Also, that was the day that ITV ceased to be ITV, and became instead Channel 3. In fact, on that day, Teletext was named 'Teletext on 3' and 'Teletext on 4' for Ch3 and Ch4 respectively.

However, everyone still persisted in calling it ITV, so they gradually reverted.

If memory serves, that's also the same day that Channel 4 started showing its own networked ads, rather than allowing the individual ITV companies to insert their own ads in the breaks.

jd