The world's first teletext service has had a fine run, comfortably outliving its technological peers like Betamax, the Walkman and the ghettoblaster.
But anyone born in the 90s may not understand the significance of a service that was both revolutionary and ubiquitous.
For Ceefax preceded the 24-hour rolling news and sports channels of today by two decades, and was used by over 20 million people in the 1990s when the internet was still being developed by US boffins.
In the 80s and 90s, Ceefax was THE source of breaking news - for most sports fans of a generation, this was how we watched football.
Today marks the death of Jeff Stelling's electronic stepfather.
Men now sit glued to the constant regurgitation of Sky Sports News in their local Wetherspoons or living rooms, but this was once the preserve of Ceefax.
As a sport-mad child, the first port of call on return from school was the routine of 301 (Sports Headlines), 302 (Football Headlines), 303-312 (Football News) and 340 (Cricket Headlines).
This routine was upped to hourly during the school holidays and Teletext was a dramatic source of tension.
Kids listen up, adults you know this. Each teletext page could include multiple pages (signified by a 1/4 for four pages in the top right-hand corner) so when the 312 football news in brief page increased from 1/5 to 1/6 this was a moment of great suspense.

But the disappointment when you sat through the automatic 25 second carousel (no cheats like a fast forward were available back then) to reach page six and find out 'Maurice Malpas had returned to training' was palpable.
Few Ceefax moments were tenser than when BBC broke to the news with Graham Gooch in the 290s against India in 1990. His landmark 300 came up via page 341. We all knew what was coming by the time Richie Benaud had been restored to our screens.
Gary Lineker once said he would rather watch Wimbledon on Ceefax. But the truth was this was how most people watched Wimbledon at least in real-time. The in-running football vidiprinter on Ceefax while you watched Eddie Waring commentate on Bradford Northern v Castleford in the Rugby League was a regular Saturday afternoon.
So it was with great enthusiasm that my break in the media industry came working for William Hill Sports Information Department who at the time tendered for teletext contracts.
I became very much the Dele Adebola teletext, a journeyman who had spells on the teletext services of BBC Racing, BBC World Service, Sky Sports, CNN and Eurosport as contracts came and went in the space of two years.
The success of all teletext services was its' immediacy.
The teletext equivalent of the Sky Sports News yellow bar or the subject trending on Twitter was the in-vision breaking news on Ceefax, the very method I discovered about the Lockerbie disaster before BBC1 interrupted their scheduled programming.
The use of a bigger font was equally a watchword that something major had happened - the death of Jock Stein bringing an unprecedented font size=4 to page 301.
When I began working on these contracts, you began to realise you were working with a powerful tool.
With a user base that dwarfed the circulation of any national newspaper and restricted access to the agency wires that are replicated in real-time today on TV and internet, we had a duty and a privilege.
I was one of the first people in the UK to publish news of the death of Fabio Casartelli at the 1995 Tour de France. And of course with power comes pressure.
It was not uncommon to prepare two indexes so you could beat your rivals to the punch at the end of a football match. Of course if you publish the index with the wrong result in, you are in big trouble as a senior editor at ITV Teletext found....an incident followed by a prompt demotion down the food chain.

This was a service that developed in the UK whilst Leonid Brezhnev was running the USSR. We also controlled the flow of information not due to ideology but due to space.
A teletext page was limited to 11 lines with a maximum of 38 characters per line (always 3 paragraphs of 3 or 4 lines, 5 line paragraphs were frowned upon).
A report had to be just one page. Many a Tour de France report during the 90s began with the sentence 'Djamolidine Abdoujaparov of Uzbekistan' which was exactly 38 characters and filed the entire line.
When Manchester United won 6-2 at Highbury in the League Cup, you were lucky if you got any more information in than the goalscorers.
Teletext editors became masters of the synonym, for index headlines had to fill out a line with no more than one character of space. Win, loss, glory, beaten, triumph - the sliding scale of terms between 3 and 7 characters that we could rattle off without thought to fill the gap.
But of course now teletext is an anachronism.
The internet offers the breadth and depth that teletext could never provide.
3G, soon to be 4, warp-speed broadband, smartphones and tablets offer portability of access.
Now we are approaching a time of Connected TV - the current trend of integration of the Internet and Web 2.0 features into modern television sets and set-top boxes.
But Ceefax had this in the most rudimentary form 25 years ago, it was simply called the 'Mix' button on your remote control.
Teletext has no place in the modern media landscape. Nostalgics can only hope that Dave starts showing repeats of the best of Ceefax.
Lee Walker is Managing Editor of the Eurosport-Yahoo! website, he started his career working for various teletext services


