A FEW NOTES ABOUT TELETEXT
As you may have seen, I have decided to style my station's web page with some inspiration from Teletext systems of the 80s.
While the system is still used in many countries, like Italy, there are countries where service has been stopped, and where many users still have got some nostalgia for it, like the UK.
Because of its very limited graphic possibilities, the system forced content editors and creators to write text and to create graphic decorations in the only possible form of pixel art.
It is important to remember that today (2020) when we talk about pixel art we can usually find 128x128 pixel images with maybe even 256 colours (of course there are different styles where images are more or less pixelated), but a whole Teletext page was, in its standardized form, a grid of 24 lines with 40 charachters each, and with only 7 colours (8 if we want to count black).
Teletext colours are: the three primary colors, and the combination of 2 of them (the combination of all of them would be white, and the combination of none is black). Here is a simple table with each color's Decimal Code (rgb) and Hex Code:
RED rgb(255,0,0) #FF0000
GREEN
rgb(0.255.0) #00FF00
BLUE
rgb(0,0,255) #0000FF
YELLOW
rgb(255,255,0) #FFFF00
MAGENTA
rgb(255,0,255) #FF00FF
CYAN
rgb(0,255,255) #00FFFF
WHITE
rgb(255,255,255) #FFFFFF
BLACK
rgb(0,0,0) #000000
Why is Teletext important for Amateur Radio? Because it showed us a way to do data broadcasting long before the Internet was here.
The data transmission is one way only: there is, obviously, no way to
send back any information. Because of this, the system has to continuosly
send out the data for all the pages, and it is up to the receiving
stations to tune up correctly and select the desired page.
At the
same time, the system, like all kinds of radio communication, can serve a
potentially infinite number of receivers without any concerns about
overloading, which is an obvious weakness of any web-server.
I think that this could serve as inspiration for an asymmetrical type
of data communication between a single transmitting station and multiple
receiving stations.
Where Amateur Television is done, there are
sometimes Teletext pages embedded in the transmission like it was usually
done. Maybe its time to start exploring the possibilities of using only
Teletext in the same way we use HTML over TCP/IP (which, by the way, ham
radio operators are already doing over the airwaves since the mid 1980s).
73 de IU4NLA
WE ❤ RADIO
*** COLOUR TEST ***
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0123
4567 90AB
CDEF #?!è
()%&
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