Ceefax is dead, long live Ceefax! Meet the fans resurrecting the ingenious service

It is 10 years since Ceefax ceased to be, at 23:32:19 BST on 23 October 2012, when the last analogue TV signal was switched off in Northern Ireland. It seems longer ago than that – probably because most of us had stopped using it years earlier. With its pixelated graphics and agonisingly slow rolling screens, it had long since been usurped by new media.

But if Ceefax was a relic by the end, it’s easy to forget that its birth was an information revolution, and a breathtaking technological accomplishment. It was a precursor to the world wide web, only without the porn and arguments. In his eulogy to the service, Guardian columnist Barney Ronay pithily referred to it as “the horse-drawn internet”.

The BBC had long been tinkering with offering a written-word news service. In the 1960s, the corporation experimented with the idea of broadcasting a newspaper to hard-copy printers in homes during the early hours of the morning. However, the printer was deemed too