Transmission of 40x25 character mapped screens of information in the unused parts of PAL television broadcasts. Also a display mode for the BBC micro. Some rudimentary graphics characters, colour changes encoded as characters and the ability to hide some information also came along.

You need a suitably equipped TV to pick it up, whereupon you get pages and pages of normally fairly useless information presented to you very, very slowly. The pages are updated on cycles. Normally, you enter the number just after the page was sent so you have to wait for it to come round again.
On ITV, it looks and acts even more like the WWW because half of each page is taken up with a garishly coloured advert for dubious products.

Oh, and it doesn't work if your TV reception is a bit dodgy.

-- KatieLucas

Absolutely brilliant, especially if you have a computer card that can receive it. You can download all the interesting pages and then search them for text you might be interested in. You can also fetch all the TV schedules, current news, share prices, and holiday special deals.

Modern televisions cache teletext pages in the set so that they can be read immediately.

Most Pal televisions show teletext text in the same font, carefully chosen for ease of reading. As you might expect, it's rather awkward to read.

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HistoricalNote
*** http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/
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FutureNote
*** http :// donaldr.noyes.com/cc/developments.html
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Category Concurrent Comments