Electra (teletext) VBI (WTBS was in turn owned by Turner Broadcasting System, which would purchase the Hanna-Barbera animation studio, and most shows from sister company Ruby-Spears, from Taft successor Great American Broadcasting in 1991; Turner is now part of Time Warner). Electra was America's answer to the British Ceefax or ORACLE systems, providing news headlines, weather, entertainment/lifestyle info, and other information. Electra used the World System Teletext (WST) protocol, the same protocol used by Ceefax and ORACLE, as well as by other teletext services in the rest of the European continent. Electra was one of the very few American teletext services in
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