If anyone is still looking, they will know already, but if you're like me, and simply gave up waiting for the pages to come round again (and wondered how the service was psychic, and always knew the page you were about to key in... and start counting up from two or three pages just after, so the maximum wait for the desired page was always delivered), then:

The Teletext information service on analogue and digital television will close across the UK on 16 December.

BBC - Teletext to close mid-December

I haven't checked the following note, which I found a last month, but it's probably not too far off the mark:

Teletext (with a capital T) on ITV and Channel 4 is ceasing operation in December, both on analogue and digital.

The BBC's Ceefax teletext (with a small t) service on analogue is continuing but becomes unavailable as and when analogue transmissions are switched off in each region.

The BBC's digital text service, previously called BBCi but now called Red Button, is continuing.

I have to be honest, and say that I have dialled up only a handful of these pages in the past decade, and certainly none in the past five years, if not longer.

Having read some of the comments, I am at a loss to understand any of those crying buckets over the loss of the service  - which I freely admit and agree was great in its day - and how nay of them can seriously be referring to it as "fast".

I used to try looking in on the quizzes which featured there, and generally ran screaming into the hills as frustration waiting for the next question generally drove me mad by the third question.

They did do some very good reviews of the show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but as this became better, it suffered from the same problem of frustration, and one could not seriously wait for twenty or thirty pages to roll around to see if one of them included a review of a show you were interested in, made worse if those pages had four or five sub-pages beneath them.

You could watch your fingernails growing while waiting

It used to have some good engineering and test pages too, together with some secret engineering pages that forced certain character patterns to be generated and also included some service info not normally visible to the public, but these seemed to disappear - or were moved - in the later years.

Later sets allowed one to input the number of the desired page, and have it pop up an alert when reached, but I always found myself watching and waiting for the pop up to appear, so it was no real help.

?

All the service names are given in the opening post!

Though I would say they don't go back into the opening predecessor of the systems, which was known as Oracle - more info can be found in a web search.

I doubt there is anything other than some kid opening their mouth and letting their belly rumble if there are any claims that mobile phone text messaging took its name from teletext (note, small "t"), since there is absolutely no similarity or connection between the two.

The teletext service provided information served from a provider, while mobile phone texts are... well, they're text messages sent by people from one to another, and generally don't carry any useful information, as most seem to be generated from the content of adolescent teenagers' heads

CEEFAX used to have some great features over Christmas in the early days.  One year they had very pictures using Viewdata graphics including the classic black cat down a coal mine.

Then there was a oar by oar commentary on the Henley Regatta - in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out etc

And Teleknitware for linking your knitting machine to download "programs" using the CEEFAX Telesoftware system.

MB

Quoted from Apollo

?

All the service names are given in the opening post!

Though I would say they don't go back into the opening predecessor of the systems, which was known as Oracle - more info can be found in a web search.

I doubt there is anything other than some kid opening their mouth and letting their belly rumble if there are any claims that mobile phone text messaging took its name from teletext (note, small "t"), since there is absolutely no similarity or connection between the two.

The teletext service provided information served from a provider, while mobile phone texts are... well, they're text messages sent by people from one to another, and generally don't carry any useful information, as most seem to be generated from the content of adolescent teenagers' heads

Oracle isn't mentioned in the opening post that was ITV's name for their service and was the name I had forgotten, thanks.

It may be a British thing calling mobile messages 'texts' and 'texting' as it is correctly SMS messaging is it not?

Prestel was a dial-up computer BBS - I remember dialing up to it with a Commodore 64, on a modem that could handle a blinding download speed of 1200 bytes per second! (And an upload speed of 75 bytes per second - you weren't meant to upload much.)

Quoted from BenCooper

Prestel was a dial-up computer BBS - I remember dialing up to it with a Commodore 64, on a modem that could handle a blinding download speed of 1200 bytes per second! (And an upload speed of 75 bytes per second - you weren't meant to upload much.)

Aye but I got the BT bit right  

Short Message Service - (SMS) A message service offered by the GSM digital cellular telephone system.

Using SMS, a short alphanumeric message (160 alphanumeric characters) can be sent to a mobile phone to be displayed there, much like in an alphanumeric pager system. The message is buffered by the GSM network until the phone becomes active.

Judging from American TV imports, they just call it text and texting too - unless my ears deceive me

The various BBS (bulletin board system for the uninitiated) were magic in the early days.

For those who only know the internet, to use a BBS you had to have your own modem, and be able to configure it to talk to other modems over the phone line. Most were standard, but not always. In order to connect to any BBS, you had to know the phone number, be able to dial it using the modem, and establish a connection. Only then could you type commands a line a time, and get the reply the same way. Downloads were indeed slow, and it was not unusual to spend a whole evening waiting for one file to complete, and having dinner (or sending out for chips if you were at work was not unheard of to stop the rumbling tum).

Security was a joke compared to today, and back then, if you had the connection number of a business, it was not uncommon to be able to dial it up, get connected, and browse through their server. As so few were able to do this, passwords were generally never encountered (unless you tried to get into one of my systems - I twigged to this at an early stage). Files and programs were much smaller then, and even with the slow download speed, we managed to help ourselves to one or two installed packages for word processors and other utilities.

There were generally no activity logs either, so no-one was ever any the wiser.

Quoted from Captain Brittles

Aye but I got the BT bit right  

Most other BBS at the time were 300 baud so 1200 was fast compared with that, they chose an asynchronous protocol because most traffic was just in one direction.

I think SMS is the term used in the GSM standard, it is used in MPT1327 and there are many parallels between MPT1327 and GSM.  I remember when we got out first GSM phone at work, I told the others about SMS and suggested it could be useful but they all thought it was much too fiddly for anyone to use.

MB

Aye, you could get 300/300 modems or 1200/75 ones - I got mine as a cast-off from Glasgow Uni, and in the box was the original purchase invoice - over £500 for the modem as far as I can remember! But it was way more sophisticated than the cradle-type modems because it was plugged directly into the phone lines - cradle-type ones are like in War Games, where you put your phone handset into two rubber cups.

Prestel was amazing because it actually had text and layout - it did look a lot like Teletext, actually.

SeSco Forum members beat the media again, as they take inspiration from our comments, and reveal:

For a technology that has become so all-pervasive that texting has been included in the Oxford English Dictionary, SMS (short message service) was not designed as a mass market consumer communications service at all.

"It was designed to use some spectrum and provide an internal messaging service for engineers and maybe become the beginnings of a Teletext-type service," explains Mike Short, chief technology officer for Telefónica O2 Europe. "In the early 1990s we had Teletext and Ceefax on the TV, and in some countries people said 'maybe we could do this on a mobile phone one day'. But in the early 1990s the screens were so tiny that people could not envisage it, we had no connectivity to the internet so people experimented a little bit."

Texting was never actually designed for consumer market | Business | guardian.co.uk