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2023: “can we turn it off?”
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.
“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…”
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.
“Hm — twenty dead and fifteen missing!”
“I could have sworn I killed more…”
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 UKIn Germany we say Teletext
It’s mostly just another advertising channel for premium phone numbers and bs horoscopes, phone sex lines or bs “surveys” where you txt an expensive number. All the content is autogenerated like weather, sports results or program preview.
Ukrainian one has a phone number you can text to post messages in a global chatroom for around 1cent per message
the chat is still up and full of bisexual men looking for partners for some reasonYeah in Germany there are sex over phone numbers on the Teletext from every single channel that is not tax sponsored.
