Episode Details

Before the web, before dial-up, a generation pressed the "text" button and waited for pages to cycle past on their TV screens. This episode unpacks the surprisingly resilient history of broadcast teletext — from the BBC's Ceefax in 1974 to Ireland's Aertel, and the Dutch service that still broadcasts today. We get into the mechanics of how data rode in the vertical blanking interval, why teletext felt internet-like but wasn't, and what we lost when instant, personalized feeds replaced the shared ritual of waiting for a page to arrive. Episode #802663 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/802663