Comment A Great Hack (Score 1) 160
This lasted for nearly 3 decades, and was only really obsoleted in the days of DVB-T. That's pretty good going, and definitely served a purpose: subtitles, news, stock market information and cheap holiday adverts...
DataBlast, a small magazine that delivered pages of text at 5 per second (I think) during the titles of Bad Influence - a TV programme in the UK devoted to computer games - was probably inspired by Ceefax/Oracle. You needed to record the section on video (remember them?) and then use pause to read the content.
I had the dubious pleasure of writing a system that would genlock and be able to deliver the necessary frame rate live, from an Amiga 1200... Clunky to the extreme, it was canned after 2 seasons because it was so much work still. (My system replaced a system written in AMOS by one of the production crew which relied on hard coding the screens. A step in the right direction, but still a lot of work...)
So respect to the chaps and chapesses that came up with this and managed to fit so much information into essentially dead bandwitdh!