Also for everybody looking for a blast from the past, ARD offers their Ceefax (or in this case Teletext) online:
https://www.ard-text.de/
The old style blocky teletext survived digital switch over in Germany as it is still very popular and the channels decicded to use the DVB-TXT standard integrated in DVB. Mainly also because DVB-TXT is guaranteed to be compatible with pretty much any set-top-box.
Good old Teletext! It's so quick and simple really - no wonder the digital versions didn't catch on here, they took ages to load! Its nice something so antiquated is still going.
... yes around 45 years old from here in the UK - a bit less in Germany ... has any other "IT" Technology lasted as long!
We felt it was quick in part because it was but also the acceleration that Fastext gave in caching the most likely pages
you would want to view next and guiding you to them.
Navigation by TOP (table of pages) as used in the German sytesm - was more regimented but agian cached a page
The Launch of MHEG5 Digital text was hindered by the most popular Set top box taking TWO transmission cycles
to capture the page .... once to see that the page was being transmitted and then to read it so it was not fast !!!!
There was also perhaps not enough bit rate allocated - Certainly Teletext Ltd felt very aggreived by this
and the Carouselling engines were not as sophisticated as the ones used for Teletext,
In the background the BBC were more web orientated
- and there was not the same sophistication authoring equipment as Both Ceefax and bbc,co,uk had for their patforms ..
It was almost back to dumb terminals.
And MHEG5 was not language and format which was widely known
- which is why its origination equipment is almost 20 year old and until v recenstly not maintained
But the real luxury was teletext set with 4M of RAM!
- all pages acccessible instanstly after about 3 mins of being tuned into a channel
But 2000 was the year in which most Teletext Origination equipment was sold
...and carried on for two years ....
