1980: "Telefuture" - Everything Old is New Again!

[ValiantVendetta]

My folks bought flights off teletext in the mid 90s in the UK when they moved us there for a year when I was a child. I used to read a little news and check TV scheduling with the teletext myself.

[damoz89]

"Incredibly complex games" LOL

[spacetweek]

Ladies and gentlemen, start your video machines!

[joconnor6]

Look at that incredibly complex game!

[tranceotaku]

The future, our perception of it changes all the time. I'm glad we still have ways to remember how the past looked, and how far we have come.

[honestjoe1000]

"Government controlled BBC"!? Also - Ceefax & Oracle were launched in 1975. We were spoilt back then!

[lwdehaas]

How can this ever be played in 720p? They didn't even have it back in the 80s! ;)

[VortexTech]

@lwdehaas Secret process. Seriously, the video was digitized at DV data rates and was kept at high resolution throughout editing and transcoding. Policy here is to try keep all video at the highest resolution possible for processing and display.

[g7mzh]

Nice to se a Philips VLP600 Laservision player at 1'35" - these discs you can't record on will naver catch on! :)

Pity the US never took to teletext.

[pvx]

@g7mzh Yes, it was a shame teletext never got popular here in the States. There were a few domestic teletext services here such as Electra (carried on Superstation TBS' video back in the 80s and early 90s) and CBS' ExtraVision, but they never gained the success of Ceefax & ORACLE. And to make the situation worse, the only American-market TV manufacturer that ever offered teletext decoding in their sets was Zenith... :(

[wgfinley]

Way cool! Andrew Gaspar, shown here with RCA, is now a venture capitalist (Gaspar Global Ventures) and you can see why in his prophetic comments here.

Fred Briggs was a long-time NBC reporter who died of cancer in 1995.

Thanks for sharing!

[FlyingHeadbutt100]

1:35 Is that The Smallest Person In The World with a toploading DVD player?

[TheSeanMichaeltion]

Didn't ALF get dissected in a lab?

[InsaneWithAReason]

HOLY SHIT!!! Is this for real? Oh My God!!!!!!

[therobeson]

Alf!!!

[VortexTech]

@therobeson That's "ALF" -- don't upset the alien puppet.

[bagelsandstuff]

Fallout: New Vegas got boring fast; maybe I need something with more depth, like that incredibly complex game they showcased.

[reluctantpopstar]

Oooooohh...40 whole channels, huh?

[DeathBringer9000]

any information you want on a monitor? how absurd. thatll never catch on...

[codepoetYT]

Yes.. Apple computers still prominent in the media :-)

[jpheiser]

I miss those network promo campaigns from the 70s and 80s.

[BenDoverman]

Incredibly complex games...uh, ok.

[proceedapathy]

Who's the character at 4:36 again.. I can't think of the name right now..?

[VortexTech]

@proceedapathy ALF!

[proceedapathy]

@VortexTech ooo yeah!

[sdflksdfkfh]

Hi Reddit!

[gabydewilde]

haha, that was fantastic. I love retrofuturism.

The reference to tellietext being a thread to mainstream news was funny. Some guru might have said there are letters on the screen! Our book printing monopoly is endangered! All kinds of organizations could have foreseen the dangers of informed customers.

You should ask around what one of those tellie text pages actually costs nowadays. Start with your local Tee Vee stations.

Here it is over 1000 X the price of a domain name - for one page

[altimablackberry]

love ur videos do you have anything about extraterestrial (sry if spelled wrong)