A recreation of a much-loved technology by an Enniskillen man has delighted people around the world.

Nathan Dane (20) has designed a recreation of the popular ‘Ceefax’ teletext technology – the original system that ended in 2012 when analogue teletext signals were phased out.

Inspiration and a love for coding began early for Nathan, he said: “I started off at Kilskeery Independent Christian School, which is where I got my GCSEs and also where I won my first Raspberry Pi [specialised computer that’s especially popular with coding clubs] as part of a Code Club competition.”

Nathan then studied at Belfast Met, completing a BTec in Electrical/Electronic Engineering. While at college he competed in a WorldSkills Competition, and won Gold at the UK National Finals.

A long-time project

Reviving Ceefax was a long-time project for Nathan, who has Ceefax archives dating back to 2016. He said: “The thing is, a few different people have coded similar ideas in the past, but forgot about them, so when the BBC or other providers change their websites, and the code stops working, their systems no longer work; whereas I have kept my system going all that time.”

Explaining his interests, Nathan said: “I’ve always been interested in broadcasting, and as a younger person it was always the older technology I could get my hands on.

“When I discovered that you could use a Raspberry Pi to produce a ‘real’ teletext service, I had to try it.”

Realising it may take some time to develop content for Ceefax, Nathan turned to code to recreate it. He said: “To begin with, I didn’t really know what to put on it, because it would take far too long to type out all the content, so I looked into automatically generating the content with code.”

The idea developed from there and he added pages that would be useful for himself and others.

“I coded up all the pages that my family would be interested in reading, such as the national and local news and weather information.

“Once that was done I started adding other pages that would be useful to other people but that I wasn’t really interested in, like the financial news. There were also some internal pages of ‘School News’ that were only for my sister and I,” he told this newspaper.

Nathan has been pleased with the recent reaction once media outlets found out about his service, he said.

“The service has been publicly available for quite a while now [since 2019], so it’s nice to finally get some recognition for it. As well as all the newspapers and radio interviews, I’ve also had some emails from engineers and journalists who worked on the original Ceefax service, which was nice – and it’s brought traffic to other parts of my website as well.”

You can see Nathan’s version of Ceefax for yourself over at his website, https://www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk/teletext-viewer/.