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

This 1980 news report explores the predicted world of future television, particularly in terms of information services technologies -- with a concentration on Teletext and Viewdata systems. This is particularly fascinating given that now, in 2010, "convergence" of Internet services back to the television is the latest trend. This video also includes a couple of hopefully interesting/amusing beginning and ending clips (from a bit later than 1980) bracketing the report. From the Vortex Video Archive.

More information about this segment: http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000773.html

Information regarding the techniques being used to recover these archival recordings: http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000768.html

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Telefuture
• television
• future
• teletext
• viewdata
• videotex
• information
• services
• Ceefax

[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.

[therobeson]

Alf!!!

[VortexTech]

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

[proceedapathy]

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

[VortexTech]

@proceedapathy ALF!

[joconnor6]

Look at that incredibly complex game!

[damoz89]

"Incredibly complex games" LOL

[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.

[spacetweek]

Ladies and gentlemen, start your video machines!

[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... :(

[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!

[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.