I remember when TVs had special features regarding teletext, like some sort of page cache where you didn't need to wait for pages to load. Weirdly enough, contemporary TVs don't do this, despite memory and parallel processing power for this not being an issue. Or maybe I'm just remembering this as working better than it did…
If your TV/VCR had this and ShowView/VCR Plus, you were riding the knife edge of the future…
I can't say my parents' TVs had zero memory, but it was at least very limited compared to my grandparents' TV.
The former was maybe fast if you were on page X and navigated to page X+1, X+2, maybe X+3 and X+4 (is that how the coloured buttons were usually arranged?) but for everything else was slow.
At my grandparents, every page was retrieved almost instantly.
>is that how the coloured buttons were usually arranged?
I think it depends on the system in use, but from my recollection it was a hierachical system - so from the home-page you may have links to News, Sport, Weather and TV Listings; from the News Page, the links may have been to National News, Regional News, etc.
Maybe when you got to an individual story one would be a link to 'next page' (or story) and the other 'previous page'?
One of the best uses I found was a low-fi daily quiz. Each page had a question and four answers, and you pushed the button for which you thought was correct. I think it also demonstrated that pages need not have a completely numeric id - I recall the quiz pages being something like '12;' - presumably to stop you cheating and jumping directly to an answer.
I believe Fastext was implemented with pre-caching. Since the page declared which the four page numbers were, the Teletext decoder was able to pre-fetch those pages while you read? This is what made it fast.
Essentially if you spent half a minute reading a page, the four coloured fast text pages were already received.
Being at a local, amateur radio station in Belgium in the 80's/90's we read some of our "news" or sports results from Teletekst. (Who were we fooling?) Being the amateurs we really were, half the time the page would flip while we were halfway through reading it on-air, with the cache not working or not loaded yet, and having to improvise your way out of it. I don't think anyone was really listening to these (former-)pirate stations by that time anymore, but it still was embarrassing. Oh, I am so nostalgic for those days...
They did, basically teletext iterated over pages so for one channel it was not that much data. I think teletext now is mvp feature that no one actually develops after it works most of the time. Thus worse user exeperience.
If your TV/VCR had this and ShowView/VCR Plus, you were riding the knife edge of the future…