There are userspace workarounds for much of what was dropped, there were no real upstream maintainer of this stuff, and it was justifiable to drop AX.25 support. I don't really understand any of it, nor am I in the unenviable position of keeping it around/working. But a real mixed bag of ham news, AFAICT.

I'm planning on building my own Teletext service at some point as part of a wider analogue TV project. It's a cool form for things like the news because you have to be very concise for it to work in such a constrained format; it's the opposite of today where long-form content that doesn't really say anything is dirt cheap to emit at scale. Some of the British services had rudimentary games too like Bamboozle, a quiz game which relied on hexadecimal pages the remote couldn't enter manually.

One thing I'd also like to reinstate is NICAM digital stereo which British analogue TV used to have, most modulators I've come across only generate a mono FM subcarrier in PAL mode so looks like I'm going to be building my own modulator.

They used to rent a single scan line (VBI) of the TV broadcast to use as a data transmission method encoded the same way Teletext was. IIRC you could fit 45 bytes in a single scan line, with 50 per second that gives you a nationwide data broadcast capability of something like 18 kbit/s. We had a 19,200 bits/second leased line to send the data.

That scan line was really really expensive I seem to remember! If your TV wasn't quite adjusted properly you could see the data scan lines at the top of the screen as flickering white dots and lines which was fun.

The data got sent to financial institutions for real time stock feeds and nationwide networks of shops.

I never worked on the code for that part of the business though - I worked on the replacement system which ran via satellite with much more bandwidth at much lower cost.

Eventually the internet killed that too :-)

The pages were send one by one so if you typed 200 you would have to wait for page 200 to cycle by. If it had 100 sub pages you would have to wait 100 times as long. I believe more important pages could be send more often or similarly the cycle would skip less important pages. Decent TV's would just store pages and sub pages until the next cycle.

I asked crappy local TV stations what a page would cost but they didn't have anything under 1500 guilders per month (comparable to $1500 today) which was an absurd amount of money for 1kb of hosting.

No wonder that, besides news, subtitles and the tv guide, the thing was entirely filled with lottery phone lines, astrology lines, sex lines and similar trash.