ORACLE (teletext) 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 of available receivers, exact launch dates have been left obscure. Receivers became popular around 1980. In Britain ORACLE, ITV's teletext service, was launched as
Teletext as the internet, whereby pages are 'requested' and then 'sent' to the user – a method not possible given the one-way nature of broadcast teletext. Unlike the Internet, teletext is broadcast, so it does not slow down further as the number of users increase, although the greater number of pages, the longer one is likely to wait for each to be found in the cycle. For this reason, some pages (e.g. common index pages) are broadcast more than once in each cycle. Teletext proved to be a reliable text news service during events such as the September 11 terrorist attacks,