1983 - The future of TV is... printers!

Way back in the ‘80s when I were a lad, there was a TV technology that was quite popular in the UK called Teletext. It allowed broadcasters to transmit “pages” of simple text and graphics alongside the usual television content. The BBC called their service Ceefax and ITV’s was called Oracle. The broadcaster would send all of its pages in sequence which could be stored in a memory buffer in the TV. To access a specific page, you had to input its 3 digit number via the remote control. The buffer must have been somewhat limited because I remember you quite often had to wait a few seconds for the sequence of pages being sent to get to the page you wanted.

A typical Ceefax index page that provided the page numbers of related content. Kinda like a homepage with links…

Of course, with all this up-to-date information available, the obvious next step is a way to print it out so you could save it for later…? Stick it to the fridge? Make a scrapbook? Philips was ready to help. Their 26CS3890 TV, a 26” color TV, had a built-in thermal printer so at the push of a button you could print your Teletext pages to save forever, or however long it took the print on the thermal paper to fade.

All this for the low, low price of £699. That’s roughly equivalent to £2000 pounds today. The only price I could find for a regular 26” color TV was £350 for a Siemens in the Dixon’s catalog. Bit of a premium for that printer then, especially when you see the size of the printout. I hope you got a few rolls of paper with it.

The mighty Philips 26CS3890. Read your news on a till receipt!