Technology is always, in the end, a bit disappointing, if only because we tend to burden it with such imaginative expectations. For example, despite the best efforts of comics across several generations, there is no sign anywhere of the disintegrator ray, or of the metallic silver face visor, or of entire meals that come in pellet form and taste delicious slipped casually into a glass of water. Robots in particular have been a massive disappointment. Doing the hoovering, dancing on YouTube, walking a dog in Japan: robots are better than this.

The idea has always been that robots would at some point become evil, develop a malevolent intelligence, learn to run fast in a frightening, spidery way, and finally assume control of our barren, dust-blown future world, thereby confirming the ancient narrative of mankind's destruction by its own hand whether by – ahem – accumulated sin or by a successful and concerted robot uprising. Basically robots need to take a good look at themselves.

Sometimes though technology simply dies a natural death, outmoded by other, newer technology. This is pretty much what has happened to teletext – also known variously as Ceefax, Oracle or The One On Channel 4 – which died this week after 38 years of service, much of it related to coverage of sport. The original horse-drawn internet, Ceefax is finally no more: a brilliantly cheap, brilliantly simple, hugely successful piece of technology that somehow seemed to age at triple-speed.

There was some excitement on the day after Ceefax's final page, a kind of suicide note ("I have been frozen out, another victim of BBC ageism") as though – ha ha – there actually had been a death. This seems an unnecessary lightening of a what is a genuine moment of machine-bereavement, the disappearance for ever of the hidden robot face behind your TV screen.

It will be a source of minor sadness for anybody who came to rely on that discreet but authoritative presence during those analogue years when, pre-rolling news, TV text had an absolute monopoly on these things. It was all so beautifully simple. Ceefax came in three formats. There. Not there. Or the upsetting and unnecessary "mix", which produced a horrible melding of overlaid text and TV pictures, based around an idea that it might be agreeable to "watch" Ceefax and moving pictures simultaneously, creating a kind of nightmare cyborg world of spectral floating league tables and walking babbling human beings, faces obscured by phrases like "Swindon Town" and "Michael Atherton", first unwitting victims of some strangulating football text-based robot dawn.

Above all Ceefax was brilliant for sport. Even in death its page numbers remain horribly vital. Page 302 – a familiar spasm of finger and thumb – was football headlines. This was the real heart of Ceefax. Page 300 was always technically the sport home page, but there was something a little too diffuse and scattered about it, where the real strength of Ceefax was its remorseless focus. Page 324 was league tables. 316 was scores. 312, my thumb and finger want to tell me, was news in brief. Page 340 was the gateway to cricket, where my own favourite Ceefax memory was spent watching the numbers slowly flicker past as Brian Lara scored the last 200 runs of his world record 501 not out against Durham in 1994, an experience that ended with hugs and handshakes around the room, a sense of binding shared achievement, of really having seen the refresh function on page 347 through those difficult final overs. I saw the Lara 501 moment again later on TV: a roly-poly part-time early-evening half-volley thrashed through the covers to scattered whoops from the ground staff It was, frankly, no competition.

Beyond this Ceefax was an example of genuine technical ingenuity, a BBC invention devised in the early 1970s by Corporation engineers in Surrey who found a way of sending information encrypted within the ordinary analogue TV signal. The Ceefax service was officially launched in June 1974, broadcast through a mini-computer known as "Esmerelda".

And for a while it was Ceefax fever out there, the miracle of man-made electric TV-words driving a nationwide upgrading of TV sets along the lines of the recent flat-screen rush. In October 1981 the government announced the first – and, it turns out, only – National Teletext Month, as the British model for TV text services was rolled out around the world.

Mainly Ceefax was that vanished thing, a voice of quiet authority: entirely straight, irreproachably trustworthy, even its name – "see facts" – devoid of all frippery. Ceefax had no side to it. Not only was its prose furiously disciplined, it was also entirely free of vanity. And in this it was, pertinently, an emblem of the BBC at its best.

Ceefax had no byline picture. It had no angle to work, no cloud of nuanced personal ambition. Even in death there will be no Ceefax sex scandal. Ceefax did not have a caravan. Ceefax didn't want to feel you up. Ceefax wouldn't come jangling and panting and scrabbling at your door after lights out. In fact Ceefax had no interest in you at all. And this was the real nub, perhaps even its greatest distinction: it was courteously and brusquely non-interactive, unscarred by the current urge to embellish all – Have your shout! Speak your spume! Tell Us what YOU think even if it is essentially INANE and imitative MEWLING! – with the legitimising babble of transient public opinion.

Perhaps we could still learn a little from Ceefax's orderly restraint at a time when all broadcasting seems intent on thrusting its great meaty fists out through the screen and presenting not so much a sense of authority, as a babble of shared misdirection, and when Sky Sports is even now broadcasting a kind of man-Ceefax on Saturday afternoons, a Ceefax of the flesh with real actual men dressed in wedding suits and ranged in front of invisible screens, frowning, shrugging, squawking, and essentially being human Ceefax on a grand, mob-handed scale.

Faced with this Ceefax already seems laughably old-fashioned, not just over but entirely outside its time, untuned to the rhythms of a more voracious, participatory, chaotically needy media. The chair is now empty. The face behind the screen has gone, a last broadcasting hero of an age that has decisively passed.