ORACLE (teletext) television listings beyond its midnight closing time on New Year's Eve 1992. It merely stated "00:00 the end of Oracle, now the nightmare begins.". ORACLE (teletext) ORACLE (from "Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics") was a commercial teletext service first broadcast on the ITV network in the mid-late 1970s and later on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, finally ending on both channels at 23:59 UTC on 31 December 1992. It was developed and launched by a consortium backed by the Independent Broadcasting Authority at about the same time as the BBC's Ceefax service. Due to the lack
Teletext hardware that could download pages of up-to-date news, reports, facts and figures targeting U.K. agriculture. The original idea was the brainchild of Philips (CAL) Laboratories in 1970. In 1971, CAL engineer John Adams created a design and proposal for UK broadcasters. His configuration contained all the fundamental elements of classic Teletext including pages of 24 rows with 40 characters each, page selection, sub pages of information and vertical blanking interval data transmission. A major objective for Adams during the concept development stage was to make Teletext affordable to the home user. In reality, there was no scope to make an