Hacker News Reader

> To access these pages, viewers typed the three-digit page number required into their TV remote control and waited a few seconds for information to appear on the screen.

You can tell from "a few seconds" that the author of this article never actually used Ceefax.

View on HN

Not the author but I grew up using this tech and I recall it being seconds rather than minutes.

There must have been some TVs with a page cache? (Not that I ever saw one, admittedly).

It would have to be on and tuned into the right channel in the first place in order to build a cache.

Yes, they where. But you needed to wait to get all the pages, which wasn't a fast procedure. Around a minute or such, I can't remember.

It depended on the page. Clearly to have a complete cache you'd have to wait for everything to have come around, but common pages like contents or news headlines were transmitted more often than the others, so they entered the Fasttext cache more quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com