Nostalgia tech
For tech fans across the UK, this midwinter will be bleaker than ever. A cloud will be cast over the Christmas dinner. How can we be merry, they will all ask, when the New Year brings with it the demise of TV information service Teletext?
Today, the residents of Jersey will bid farewell to one of Britain’s remaining analogue dinosaurs, and the rest of us will follow suit in January. No more package holidays through the telly, no more garish 888 subtitles, no more Peter Kay gags (booked it, packed it... you know the rest). You’ll have to use the internet or something for all that.
Let’s be honest, most of us can’t remember the last time we used Teletext (I think, for me, it was looking up some listings for the cinema in Bury. Must have been about 1994). But we’ll be sad to see it go. This TV giant has been around since the seventies, and as such it has been a part of our childhood. OK, a small part. But it was definitely there, and for some reason, it makes us weirdly nostalgic.
These days, technology moves so fast that it’s hard to get attached. Just as you’ve worked out how to access email on your latest mobile phone, your inbox is filled with adverts for the new and updated version. You buy an HDTV only to realise that now you need a 3D one. You fall in love with your iPhone, and then they tell you that the new one has a digital compass (STOP THE PRESS). But Teletext is older than a good many tech fans out there, and is a retro champ that felt like it would be around forever.
In years to come, will we find ourselves reminiscing about the Playstation 3 in the same way as we lovingly recall the Commodore 64 (‘Aah, and it used to take a good ten seconds for the games to load...’)? Will we get as nostalgic about the LG Chocolate as we do about the ‘brick’ we had at high school? Or, in this fast-paced industry, will they appear as nothing more than dots on a fast changing tech horizon?
So, should auld acquaintance be forgot, we raise a glass to an analogue legend. And we look forward to seeing which heroes of the digital age have as much longevity.