An interesting report of 80's "internet"

It's Incredible to see how much things have evolved, and also the guys from the video were right, it was the future.

 

You did? In Greece we start having Teletext on middle '90s. :evil:

 

I was already thinking as young boy (in the middle 80s), why has the graphics of teletext to be looking so awful? :lol:



And it just looks still the very same today.

 

Because it had to transmit data on a couple of lines at the top of the screen (you had about 44 lines to send data and each line could have about 40 bytes per line, you had 25 frames so you didn't have a great deal of data to play with, in the early days they tended only to use half the lines as they doubled the data for error correction). In a nutshell it meant that teletext could display about 12 pages a second... not really enough time to transmit high quality pictures....

Teletext was invented by the BBC engineering department back in the 70s mainly so subtitles could be displayed but was expanded upon so they could have more useful data. Over the years Teletext was expanded upon with the first being a way to display other countries extended characters. level 3.5 could display pictures where as 4 and 5 were experimental but no country used them, which was a pity as it would have been as good as what you got on digital tv teletext like services (which is not really teletext....).

If you want to read about the technical side of teletext then have a look at this long winded pdf...

http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_i_ets/300700_300799/300706/01_60/ets_300706e01p.pdf

 

Ah, I recall reading about this in 80s and 90s computing magazines that I had.

As a kid, I always wished I'd get to see something like this, and now I have the Internet.

 

cool.

 

I miss those days and wish I had been more involved with computers back then. There was more of a wild wild west feeling. Of course in twenty-five years kids will be saying the same thing about right now.

"You mean back in the 2010's you could get free movies, music, and games without your security implant informing the police?"

 

I have an old Philips (S-VHS) VCR with an on-board Fastext decoder. When you make an off-air recording in S-VHS mode, you can call up the text pages also with the date/ time of the recording, as well as subtitles (if available).

There's also an early attempt at an EPG, where you can set timer recordings by highlighting a cursor on the Teletext channel listing. The timer is then set automatically. The method is called VPT (Video Programming via Teletext).

It's a shame they're turning off the analogue transmitters here in around March, so the features will be lost.

 

These people would love to hear from you if you have an old tapes.

http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/appeal.shtml

They do have a fantastic website on the history of teletext and lots of old pages too.

If you want to view BBC Ceefax on the internet you can check out

http://www.ceefax.tv/

Remember to allow it to open pop ups (as it opens a new window to show the teletext)

 

I might have a dig round and see what I find. Unfortunately I had to throw out a load of tapes last year as they all got the dreaded white mould. I think they were mostly standard VHS recordings made on an old 80's Ferguson Videostar (remember them?), but it's often quite interesting to see what was recorded off the TV all those years ago....

 

:-( That can be cleaned!!

 

I found that page as well, it had a bar graph and lots of other stuff on it.

I always wondered what it all meant, so wrote off to them asking about it, not expecting to get a reply. A couple of days later, I got a hand written letter along with a print out detailing how the whole teletext system and the status page worked.

Think i've still got it in the loft somewhere.

Back on-topic, my first attempt at 'net access was on a Commodore 64 with a huge modem that plugged into the cart port.
I can't remember what speed it was supposed to be, but as I didn't have any software with it, I never got it working.

 

NVM.

Sorry.

 

I know, but I'm guessing it would've cost money to have them all sent to a specialist to be cleaned and copied, plus I didn't think there was anything of any real importance on the tapes either.

 

My modem story? Some PCI card in a HP Pavilion my mom had bought. Was officially a 56k modem but due to something (I suspect the quality of the phone lines limited audio clarity) I could barely surpass 28.8k speeds. A friend about a half mile from me closer towards the central office could get double that (4kb/s IIRC) despite some of the phone wiring in his house being so old that I had a feeling it originally carried telegraph signals.

The place was a really old farm house renovated at some point but they had left the original wooden shingles on and simply added additional layers of shingles as time went on...How I despised his connection at the time. He could actually play Quake III! I was stuck with really laggy games of AoE.

Why yes I'm not as old as the rest of you geezers, why do you ask?

 

lol that's old!

I think that some of you guys are exaggerating. I often browse the web in the Saturn and 28.8 is not that slow. (not really that slow)

And my Win 95 computer (recently updated with a COAST module of fantastic 512 kb!) for DOS and Win games has a 28.8 modem as well lol (I don't remember using it to browse the web, though)

Wow, that's a nice piece of hardware! Never heard about that awesome technology!
It's scary how freezers browsing something are more common than VCRs browsing something. They could have created an IMDB-like-thing back in the VCR days.

 

Wow, that's cool. If you find it, make sure to post it here for us all to see.

Yakumo

 

Not quite the internet, or even Teletext, but...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN3hF8dX8TM

 

I wonder if the guy that was interviewed is still alive (the caption is hilarious "Richard Halloran" - "Owns Home Computer"), he seemed kinda aged at the time. I can imagine his excitement if he used the internet 16 years after when the video was shot (if he was still alive).

I started in 1998/99 so 56k was my first internet, i remember to connect I dialed out to a town that was long distance for a month and when the bill came it was 500$ (no more internet for a while after that!! and luckily my older sister bailed me out), I was in in first year of middle school didnt know any better.

 

this brings back the memory.
back then I was using shell account at uni and I remember the excitement when mosaic arrived! Also the buzzword, WWW ! ^ ^