teletext in north america

For Telidon, John Durno at University of Victoria Library has done stellar work on preservation. This includes decoding original artworks stored on PDP-11 floppy disks and re-creating hardware Telidon terminals (Linux, DOSBox, USB keypad, CRT) for an exhibition. His summary: John Durno | Telidon

There’s also the Remember Tomorrow: A Telidon Story online exhibit of Telidon artworks. I was at the launch event, and many of the original artists commented on how much faster the playback seemed than how they remembered it from the early 1980s.

NAPLPS, the graphics standard underlying Telidon, seems supremely weird compared to modern vector graphics systems. Coordinates are transmitted as binary fractions of the screen width and height. While these can use variable numbers of bits for increased resolution (in exchange for longer transmission time), the screen geometry is always hard coded to a 4:3 aspect ratio, because of course, television screens were always going to be 4:3 …

In Germany we have a web version of public broadcasting service ARD at https://www.ard-text.de/. Since the war in Ukraine started and with the photos of it I use it for news to avoid these photos.

If you’ve got an old PAL tv, you can use VBIT2 on a Raspberry Pi for your own local teletext display: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/create-your-own-teletext-service/

You might be on your own for figuring out how to broadcast the signal, but could make a fun display by a workbench or something.