1977 – 1993retired
Apple II
“It put color graphics and VisiCalc in a plastic case, and never stopped being useful.”
“News in the blanking interval: America typed its answer to Ceefax, then the sets stopped listening.”
Electra was America's homegrown teletext service, an answer to Britain's Ceefax and ORACLE, delivering news and information through the vertical blanking interval of the TV signal. Run from 1982 by Cincinnati's Taft Broadcasting at flagship station WKRC-TV, in partnership with Tulsa's Satellite Syndicated Systems and Superstation WTBS, it served cable viewers and C-band dish owners via Galaxy 1 and Satcom 3R. For a d
In 1993 the service was shut down for lack of funding, a loss sealed by Zenith — the only US television manufacturer then offering teletext-capable sets — discontinuing them. Its earlier runway had already narrowed when SSS's Satellite Program Network, which carried Electra, went dark in 1989 after selling its transponder space to NBC for the launch of CNBC. Electra left behind the memory of a service America tried o
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“It put color graphics and VisiCalc in a plastic case, and never stopped being useful.”
“Enhanced in name, eternal in our hearts — lowercase letters never looked so good.”
“1250 lines of European ambition, politely ahead of its time and sadly early to the party”