July 9, 2009
An expert from the book Future Facts published in 1977:
Television programs are on the air virtually twenty-four hours a day, but anyone who wants to know the weather forecast or commuter-traffic conditions has to wait until six or eleven P.M. to get that information on TV. A new receiving system, called CEEFAX, invented by engineers at the British Broadcasting Corporation in London has changed this.
A CEEFAX broadcasting station transmits up to thirty-two "pages" of up-to-the-minute information in addition to it's usual programs. This could include immediate and predicted weather conditions, for example, or the latest stock market quotations, sports forecasts and scores in London, Tokyo and Oakland; or even the movies being shown in various parts of Manhattan
The CEEFAX information magazine is inserted by the broadcasting station into the regular TV line transmissions. At the receiving end, a device attached to the convention TV receiver contains elaborate circuits. These do the job of data-extracting, decoding, storage, and alpha-numeral character-generating. The view has a push-button page selector on which he can pick any one of the thirty-two pages of information, and this will be displayed on the TV screen and the viewer can read the page against a blank screen or superimposed on a regular program. Image storage is necessary because it takes about fifteen seconds to transmit thirty-two pages, and information can be added or edited at any time during transmission.
A person going to the office in the morning can be sure of getting the 11:30 A.M. Tokyo closing prices by pressing 32.11.20 on his push-button selector. This will mean that the storage circuit will record page 32, broadcast at 11:30, and display the page when he comes home in the evening.
From the book Future Facts by Stephen Rosen
