Antiope (teletext)

Antiope was a French teletext standard in the 1980s. It also formed the basis for the display standard used in the French videotex service Minitel.

The term allegedly stood for Acquisition Numérique et Télévisualisation d’Images Organisées en Pages d’Écriture, which could be loosely translated as Digital Acquisition and Remote Visualization of Images Organized into Written Pages. Work on Antiope started in 1972 at CCETT, the newly merged French national research centre for television and telecommunications in Rennes, with first field trials in 1975. The system was officially launched in 1976 at Vidcom in Cannes, and simultaneously at the СПОРТ 76 exposition in Moscow.

Antiope ceased to be used for broadcast teletext in the early 1990s, before teletext became popular in France. It was replaced by European standard World System Teletext. However, the Antiope-derived Minitel remained in use until 2012.

A fundamental difference in technical philosophy between Antiope and the Ceefax teletext system developed by the BBC stemmed from the fact that Antiope was developed by telecommunications engineers, while Ceefax was developed by television engineers. The television engineers created a system which filled the screen with data at a fixed, predictable rate; in contrast Antiope was constructed like a packet-switching system, with variable length packets of data, as might be used on a telephone network.

In both cases, the teletext data was transmitted during the vertical blanking interval, the portion of time allocated for the electron beam to return from the bottom of the screen back up to the top between each frame of the image (which corresponds to a transmission time of 25 lines in each field of PAL or SECAM), and each line used conveyed a fixed number of bytes each cycle: 40 bytes for European systems, 32 in the United States. In the BBC Ceefax system each group of 40 bytes corresponded directly to one row of 40 characters, each byte representing both the character and its place in the row – a videosynchronous system.

...
Wikipedia