I wonder how this could pass anyone who's now older than 10 years by. Are there countries that just never had (widespread adoption of) teletext?
Most people probably haven't used or seen teletext in years, but I'd expect people to know what it is anyways because there's cultural references aplenty.
As far as I know, it was never implemented anywhere in the US. I don't think I was aware of its existence until some time in my 20s, and then only because I took an active interest in retro- and unusually constrained computing environments, and their allies such as oldschool information services.
1. AFAIK NTSC doesn’t support it, so North America never had it. There were equivalent standards but not one universal one to unify around.
2. Are there that many cultural references? I’m struggling to think of many that I saw growing up and I’m in my thirties. It existed (and I used it a lot!) but it wasn’t exactly part of the cultural zeitgeist. The internet had already taken over.
I think the only cultural references I see are football-result nostalgia. Quite a few do still crop up though (and even more so, almost every day I get an ad for a Ceefax inspired mug with my team's results on it).
I too have fond memories of using Ceefax for my football news pre-internet - the ones I remember were I think "302" for general football homepage or "310" for Scottish football scores.
21 years old here and this is the first I have seen it. At first after reading the wiki article I assumed they were talking about embedding closed captions in the vblank but I have literally never seen or heard anyone mention that you could create static "pages" over analogue tv.
Most people probably haven't used or seen teletext in years, but I'd expect people to know what it is anyways because there's cultural references aplenty.