Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics

This kind of ORACLE is not even in wikipedia, but, together with Electra it demonstrated how difficult the business aspect of teletext was and why teletext never stood a chance to succeed in the US but led a rather happy if sometimes obscure live as a subsidized service inside public service institutions.

BTW: ORACLE had at least two interesting slogans in th 80ies: Page The Oracle and Information at Your Fingertips. But it ended its service in 1992. Electra was the US version of teletext and was put out of service in 1993.

Commercial UK Teletext will end its life next year and the year when even Ceefax (aka See Facts, the mother of all tele- screen- and other textes) will sign off for good and ever is approaching fast and faster.

Such is the creative destructive force of the primitive tool called the web exerts. In the end, like DI Schenk, the erstwhile bearded chief engineer of the Austrian Broadcast Corporation, who nearly co-invented Phase Alternate Line colour-tv once remarked: Those guys will even html-ize our cosy homely TV-Sets.

Hey Teletext, we will say bye then and remember you as the first character and screen based information media in Europe, the first tech by which many people got that experience of reading from a screen. Fare thee well. HTML transported by the bits on DVB will hopefully be a worthy grandchild.

... plink