It was done. Teletext delivered news, sports results, horoscopes, closed captions, all directly to your TV in real-time. It was quite clever as a pre-internet method to deliver text content to every home.
All the people in the comments here being unaware of this makes me feel old.
It was not a thing in the places I grew up in. But when I saw it working during a European visit, it blew my mind. That was 20 years ago.
I don't know how it is in other countries, but at least here in Germany teletext is still a thing and works on all the larger channels.
Teletext is a fun art form. Too bad the graphics are only really used for tarot and phone sex ads.
Anyway, here are some of my recreations of Czech cartoon characters using the online editor at edit.tf:
I have more but I am rate limited. Imgur album
The current generation doesn't even know what a VHS is. I'm sorry, time comes for us all.
Some places didn't have that.
Like places in Asia jumped from radio to cable tv to mobile phones, skipping intermediate technologies like tv with only one or two channels, computers etc
It was a thing for most of the world, I just don’t believe it really caught on in the US, it was called teletext and was really widely used.
Can confirm. It was common here in Norway. My dad got most of his news updates and weather forcasts from there, as he was usually busy during the evening news broadcast.
we still have teletext in Ukraine even though noone really uses it. (and also we don't have analogue tv anymore, but it's still possible to use them somehow afaik)
there's even an online version of the most popular one (Intertext) which has a realtime chat feature (you can text a specific number to send your own messages, kinda like discord lol)
http://intertext.com.ua/
I kind of miss Ceefax, the BBC's Teletext service. The immediacy meant that headlines were often broken first on Ceefax before TV or radio, but the limitations meant there was little room for overly-verbose fluff. I remember using it in the early nineties for realtime flight arrivals at our local airport, so we knew when to set off to collect my grandparents.
I remember reading about a system used somewhere else in Europe where you would call a phone line and use your phone's dialpad to navigate the Teletext on your TV - that sounds very clever.
"We need a cheery headline for our upbeat vision of a bright future."
"How about a fuckload of dead people."
"No, no, it needs something else..."
"They drowned."
"You may be into something..."
"And we'll mention some are missing, suggesting that some families will never get closure and will spend the rest of their lives haunted by visions of the nightmare that might have befalled the one they loved."
"By jove! Brilliant! Okay, now about the videophone picture..."
"How about a wife getting a call about her husband from the coastguard..."
Retrofuturistic cinematic universe
2023: "can we turn it off?"
"Hm — twenty dead and fifteen missing!"
"I could have sworn I killed more..."
—Me, currently finishing up the last missions of Dishonored
Me keeping track of Russian casualties
I feel like this image has meme potential.
In Germany we say Teletext
In Denmark it was called text-TV and was an integrated part of every channel, own button on the remote and all. It was retired a few years ago since almost nobody used it anymore..
It's still available. https://www.dr.dk/cgi-bin/fttv1.exe/100
The content is mostly auto-generated, but it still serves a purpose for showing subtitles.
Yes, it can indeed be done, it's called Teletext. But by the time computers with internet showed up, people slowly but surely stopped caring about it.
At least there's still that red button on my remote that I can press to access some spiritual successor to telete- oh wait, I don't live in a country that has this. ~~So I booked a ticket to the UK~~
Imagine them pulling it off back then, but without coming up with any scroll function!
And televisions back then were tiny and not great in terms of resolution/clarity.
https://www.svt.se/text-tv/300
Even exists on the internet in Sweden
same in Ukraine lol
http://intertext.com.ua/
or telegram: @IntertextTVbot
there are even phone numbers you can text to post messages on it's messageboards for a couple of cents(and they're still up!)
(and they even kinda modernized that by allowing messages to be posted from the Telegram bot too)
(... the messages are full of bisexual men looking for partners for some reason...)
Ha! Imagine reading text off a screen. So dumb.
It's weird how some of these futurists got some of the details right (viewing news on the TV) while missing the obvious (being able to read / select / zoom-in on one article).
Can you imagine how awful it would be to project a newspaper's front page 1:1 on a TV, then try to read it? Even with a 4k TV the text would be small, and there's no way you could read it from the couch.
Finally tablets and phones achieved this a little later than expected.
Still prefer my articles written than having someone read it to me. I'm not 5 cheers.
Those poor bastards had no idea that by the time this would became reality, most of the results on screen would be junk they don't care to read. News coverage is sold to the highest bidder.
YABBA DABBA DO
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤart of the internet
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