ORACLE

~ the goodbye ~

ORACLE closed when I was eight years old in a country I had never been to, and it closed in a way that almost nothing else in this file closes. It lost an auction. There was no collapse in demand and no better product taking the audience away. A sealed envelope was opened in 1992 and somebody else's number was larger.

The name was one of those reverse-engineered acronyms that broadcast engineers used to enjoy, Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics. The technique was to hide data in the blanking interval of the television signal, the lines at the top of the picture that the screen was not showing you. The Independent Broadcasting Authority ran the first live demonstration on 9 April 1973 with about fifty pages, which is the first teletext broadcast anybody made, and the experimental service opened on 30 June 1975.

Britain then did something no other country managed at that scale. The BBC ran Ceefax and ITV ran ORACLE, both free, both riding on signals every household already received, and by the middle of the eighties a set with a decoder in it was a normal thing to buy. The count of teletext sets in the UK went from around a hundred and eighty thousand in September 1981 to something like four hundred and fifty thousand a year later. This is the one pre-web information service that made it into ordinary living rooms rather than into the homes of enthusiasts.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

ORACLE was the commercial half, which meant it carried advertising and had to earn its keep, and the character of the two services diverged accordingly. Ceefax read like a public utility. ORACLE was pushier about listings and about the things people actually turned it on for, which were the football scores and what was on next.

It was also slow in a way that has no modern equivalent. The pages cycled in sequence and your set waited for the one you had typed to come around, so a three-digit number was a request with a queue behind it. Everybody who used teletext learned to type the number and then go do something else.

~ the auction ~

The Broadcasting Act 1990 rebuilt British commercial television around cash bidding, and ORACLE lobbied hard for the teletext service to be given its own license rather than folded into the ITV franchises. It got what it asked for. The Independent Television Commission put the public teletext service out to sealed bid, and on 30 April 1992 announced that Teletext Ltd had won it with 8.2 million pounds against ORACLE's 6.7.

Teletext Ltd was a consortium of Associated Newspapers with Philips behind it. Nothing about ORACLE's operation had been found wanting. It had built the medium and then written the rules of the competition that removed it, which is a rare enough way to die that it is worth recording plainly.

~ the day it died ~

The relationship between outgoing and incoming was not warm, and ORACLE spent its last day saying so. Its television listings stopped at midnight and the final entry on the page read THE END OF ORACLE: NOW THE NIGHTMARE BEGINS. At 23:59 UTC on 31 December 1992 the service put up a card reading ORACLE gone, 1978 to 1992, with a white square in the middle of the screen, and then it was off both ITV and Channel 4.

The date on that card is worth a second look. ORACLE gave its own birth year as 1978, not 1973 and not 1975, quietly declining to count the experimental years as the real thing. Teletext Ltd came up at midnight and ran the pages for another eighteen years before digital switchover ended the format for everybody.

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