Ceefax 1974-2012

[Tedzed1]

I wonder how many used to play bamboozle? I used to play most days.

[Geaney]

The end of an era.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19996372

Thanks for posting - brought back many nostalgic memories!

Across the Channel, the French Minitel service was similarly retired at the end of June this year.

Cheers, John

[ed731pdh]

Bamber Bamboozle, now available as an app according to the other half.

[tiv48]

i remember sets fitted with prestol the decoder was huge and had more components than the res of the set never had to repair a decoder but then a gain never knew anyone who used it.
rob t

[pwdrive]

i remember sets fitted with prestol the decoder was huge and had more components than the res of the set never had to repair a decoder but then a gain never knew anyone who used it.
rob t

Yes, they were a bit that way, I don't think we had more than a handfull, Philips as I remember, the guy on the next bench to me was the Philips tech. so thankfully he had to deal with them, I was the Jap. tech doing all the Jap. TV's, I quit the trade in '87, not taken the back off a telly since, I guess I got fed up with doing thousands of recons for the likes of Rumbelows etc etc.

Lawrence.

[Tedzed1]

Does anyone remember the Philips television that had an inbuilt thermal printer for printing
teletext pages, must have been a nighmare to fix if it went wrong.

http://obsoletetellyemuseum.blogspot.co....-1984.html

[Steve_P]

Yes, I remember them. Short lived though. They were a modified K35 chassis I think,

There's details of them here... translated...

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marcelstvmuseum.com%2Fphotoalbum49.html

They were a laser printer, similar to a ZX Spectrum Printer. They were bad enough when they went wrong, but these....

Nice idea though. Rare now I should imagine.

Cheers,

Steve P.

[Mark Hennessy]

I had one of these, and I managed to fix it too!

It was a pretty straightforward set. The K35 chassis was very similar to the K30. There was an additional stereo audio PCB - but only one internal loudspeaker. It has separate bass and treble controls, and a tweeter, and external 'speaker sockets. Despite all this, it didn't sound as good as a standard K30 with its single loudspeaker.

The scart input was nice (big isolating transformer in the base of the cabinet), but didn't do RGB. I modified mine. I used a 4-pole relay to switch RGB and Fast Blanking between the teletext decoder and the scart signals, with a simple circuit to detect the presence of blanking signals from the TT PCB to switch the relay back to the TT board. As pretty much every RGB source also outputs composite PAL, it means it worked well - if you turned on subtitles, or the clock, or used "mix" mode, the TV picture behind the teletext was composite rather than RGB. A reasonable compromise.

Teletext was standard Mullard stuff - the 4-chip decoder (SAA5050, et al). Mine had a fault with the teletext decoder - looked like a faulty RAM chip, but it turned out to be an intermittent TTL chip. This, of course, could have happened to any teletext board of that era - it was nothing to do with the printer. This one had a little daughter-board that suppressed the control-code for flashing, as it was tricky to make a print-out flash. Oh, and when the printer was active, a line from the printer PCB "froze" the teletext display so that it wouldn't update mid-print.

The printer was thermal, not laser. I'd love to imagine how they would have made a laser printer fit in there! Of course, it meant you had to cut down fax rolls to fit...

The print head was interesting - it was mounted on a metal plate that oscillated back and forth. This meant that there wasn't a massive amount of thermal "spots" needed - it effectively scanned, which simplified the print head considerably.

Mine was ex-BBC. These were installed in local radio newsrooms - of course, I don't know for sure how many existed in the BBC as a whole. When it broke, no-one managed to fix it, so it was replaced with a BBC Master, a teletext adaptor, and an Epson dot-matrix printer. All of these are currently in my attic.

The TV itself? I used it for a few years, and it gave pretty good results, but 26" is too small for correctly presented widescreen, even in our small lounge (11 by 12 foot). Also, it was ugly. The black and fake-silver trim didn't age well - I much preferred my K30 (fake wood and grey plastic), which is still at Mum's place. So, with much regret, via the UKVRRR forum I gave it away at the 2010 NVCF. I hope the person still has it. Funnily enough, despite a good description and lots of photos, the person who took it didn't realise that it came with a printer...