CEEFAX to end after 38 years.

Many moons ago at home I knew one of the developers of one of them, the one where some pages you had to pay to access, they were normally about 10p if I remember correctly, he told me they had run over budget and it was getting iffy with those funding it, so they put up a page saying this page is 50p, people thought what could be special for it to cost that much so paid for it to find a picture of a 50p coin…. They ended up in profit lol. Well that’s what he told me.

Ashame to see Ceefax go. I used to use it for news, weather and even flights (Living near heathrow, it was always nice to see where certain flights had arrived from) and sport too.
I used to play bamboozle with my cousin, brilliant fun back in the 90’s 🙂
I think Ceefax plays out on BBC2 late at night too, ashame that won’t happen for much longer.

Don’t knock it, as Charlie Hunt above said, it was all there was.
I used it a lot for news back in those pre-internet days.
We used to book holidays that we found on there–or was that Teletext?
My ex-wife once found a small apartment in Greece through a Teletext ad and we had many a happy holiday there.

I also planned many a Sunday at Old Warden by carefully scrutinising
the weather pages. We used to get a Summer in those days too…!!!

By today’s standards it was basic, but like much else, seemed ‘cutting edge’ at the time.

It was an accessible location to get the latest news or sports headlines. I used it until the advent of the ‘red button’. Other than better graphics, the red button hasn’t moved much past Ceefax (and the Teletext on ITV). The news headlines are still in basic text format, but this newer format is a bit more expandable. (Yes I too used to play Bamboozle….)

It’s gone, but should not be forgotten as it was the dawn of the ‘on-demand’ age.

The only time I ever used it was normally by accident, usually by random button pushing whilst watching tv in the dark:rolleyes:

I’m with hampden98 here.

It’s easy to scoff at Ceefax now but in a pre-PC, pre-24hour news era it was a very useful media to get the latest headlines, TV guide or to read the letters on P145 or have a go at Bamboozle. Things are so much more accessible now and Ceefax has outlived its usefulness.

It was rubbish when it first came out,

I disagree. I used it every day for years- it was all we had!!