Videotex - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Videotex was one of the earliest implementations of an "end-user information system". From the late 1970s to mid-1980s, it was used to deliver information (usually pages of text) to a user in computer-like format, typically to be displayed on a television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

.

In a strict definition, videotex refers to systems that provide interactive content and display it on a television, typically using modems to send data in both directions. A close relative is teletext

Teletext

Teletext is a television information retrieval service developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. It offers a range of text-based information, typically including national, international and sporting news, weather and TV schedules...

, which sends data in one direction only, typically encoded in a television signal. Sometimes the term "viewdata" is used to describe all such systems generically. Unlike the modern Internet, traditional videotex services were highly centralized.

Videotex in its broader definition can be used to refer to any such service, including the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

, bulletin board system

Bulletin board system

A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...

s, online service provider

Online service provider

An online service provider can for example be an internet service provider, email provider, news provider , entertainment provider , search, e-shopping site , e-finance or e-banking site, e-health site, e-government site, Wikipedia, Usenet...

s, and even the arrival/departure displays at an airport. This usage is no longer common.

With the exception of Minitel

Minitel

The Minitel is a Videotex online service accessible through the telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. It was launched in France in 1982 by the PTT...

in France, videotex elsewhere never managed to attract any more than a very small percentage of the universal mass market once envisaged. By the end of the 1980s its use was essentially limited to a few niche applications.

United Kingdom

The first attempts at a general-purpose videotex service were created in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

in the late 1960s. In about 1970 the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

had a brainstorming session in which it was decided to start researching ways to send closed captioning

Closed captioning

Closed captioning is the process of displaying text on a television, video screen or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information to individuals who wish to access it...

information to audience. As the Teledata research continued the BBC became interested in using the system for delivering any sort of information, not just closed captioning.
In 1972, the concept was first made public under the new name Ceefax
Ceefax
Ceefax is the BBC's teletext information service transmitted via the analogue signal, started in 1974 and will run until April 2012 for Pages from Ceefax, while the actual interactive service will run until 24 October 2012, in-line with the digital switchover.-History:During the late 60s, engineer...

. Meanwhile the General Post Office

General Post Office

General Post Office is the name of the British postal system from 1660 until 1969.General Post Office may also refer to:* General Post Office, Perth* General Post Office, Sydney* General Post Office, Melbourne* General Post Office, Brisbane...

(soon to become British Telecom) had been researching a similar concept since the late 1960s, known as Viewdata

Viewdata

Viewdata is a Videotex implementation. It is a type of information retrieval service in which a subscriber can access a remote database via a common carrier channel, request data and receive requested data on a video display over a separate channel. Samuel Fedida was credited as inventor of the...

. Unlike Ceefax which was a one-way service carried in the existing TV signal, Viewdata was a two-way system using telephones. Since the Post Office owned the telephones, this was considered to be an excellent way to drive more customers to use the phones. Not to be outdone by the BBC, they also announced their service, under the name Prestel
Prestel
Prestel , the brand name for the UK Post Office's Viewdata technology, was an interactive videotex system developed during the late 1970s and commercially launched in 1979...

. ITV soon joined the fray with a Ceefax-clone known as ORACLE
ORACLE (teletext)
ORACLE was a commercial teletext service first broadcast on ITV in 1974 and later on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, finally ending on both channels at 23:59 GMT on 31 December 1992....

.

In 1974 all the services agreed a standard for displaying the information. The display would be a simple 40×24 grid of text, with some "graphics characters" for constructing simple graphics, revised and finalised in 1976. The standard did not define the delivery system, so both Viewdata-like and Teledata-like services could at least share the TV-side hardware (which at that point in time was quite expensive). The standard also introduced a new term that covered all such services, teletext

Teletext

. Ceefax first started operation in 1977 with a limited 30 pages, followed quickly by ORACLE and then Prestel in 1979.

By 1981 Prestel International was available in nine countries, and a number of countries, including Sweden, The Netherlands, Finland and West Germany were developing their own national systems closely based on Prestel. General Telephone and Electronics (GTE) acquired an exclusive agency for the system for North America.

France

Development of a French teletext-like system began in 1973. A very simple 2-way videotex system called Tictac was also demonstrated in the mid 1970s. As in the UK, this led on to work to develop a common display standard for videotex and teletext, called Antiope

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....

, which was finalised in 1977. Antiope had similar capabilities to the UK system for displaying alphanumeric text and chunky "mosaic" character-based block graphics. A difference however was that while in the UK standard control codes automatically also occupied one character position on screen, Antiope allowed for "non spacing" control codes. This allowed Antiope slightly more flexibility in the use of colours in mosaic block graphics, and in presenting the accents and diacritics of the French language.

Meanwhile, spurred on by the 1978 Nora

Nora

Nora or Norah may refer to:*Nora , an English and Irish feminine personal name* Nóra , a Hungarian feminine personal name-People:*Nora Aunor, a multi-awarded Filipino actress-singer-producer*Norah Baring, a British movie actress...

/Minc

Minc

MINC is a data specification language.Minc also may refer to:* Multilingual Internet Names Consortium, a non-profit organization which focuses on developing and promoting a truly multilingual Internet domain names and keywords, internationalization of Internet names standards and protocols*...

report, the French government was determined to catch up on a perceived falling behind in its computer and communications facilities. In 1980 it began field trials issuing Antiope-based terminals for free to over 250,000 telephone subscribers in Ille-et-Vilaine

Ille-et-Vilaine

Ille-et-Vilaine is a department of France, located in the region of Brittany in the northwest of the country.- History :Ille-et-Vilaine is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on March 4, 1790...

region, where the French CCETT

Centre commun d'études de télévision et télécommunications

CCETT or Centre commun d'études de télévision et télécommunications was a research centre created in Rennes in 1972 jointly by the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française and Centre National...

research centre was based, for use as telephone directories. The trial was a success, and in 1982 Minitel

Minitel

was rolled out nationwide.

Canada

Since 1970 researchers at the Communications Research Centre

Communications Research Centre

The Communications Research Centre Canada is a Canadian government scientific laboratory for research and development in the field of advanced telecommunications. For over 40 years, it has made significant contributions to the information and communications technology sector in Canada and abroad...

(CRC) in Ottawa

Ottawa

Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...

had been working on a set of "picture description instructions", which encoded graphics commands as a text stream. Graphics were encoded as a series of instructions (graphics primitives) each represented by a single ASCII character. Graphic coordinates were encoded in multiple 6 bit strings of XY coordinate data, flagged to place them in the printable ASCII range so that they could be transmitted with conventional text transmission techniques. ASCII SI/SO characters were used to differentiate the text from graphic portions of a transmitted "page". In 1975, the CRC gave a contract to Norpak

Norpak

Norpak Corporation was a company headquartered in Kanata, Ontario, Canada, that specialized in the development of systems for television-based data transmission...

to develop an interactive graphics terminal that could decode the instructions and display them on a colour display, which was successfully up and running by 1977.

Against the background of the developments in Europe, CRC was able to persuade the Canadian government to develop the system into a fully-fledged service. In August 1978 the Canadian Department of Communications publicly launched it as Telidon

Telidon

Telidon was a videotex/teletext service developed by the Canadian Communications Research Centre during the late 1970s and early 1980s...

, a "second generation" videotex/teletext service, and committed to a four year development plan to encourage rollout. Compared to the European systems, Telidon offered real graphics, as opposed to block-mosaic character graphics. The downside was that it required much more advanced decoders, typically featuring Zilog Z80

Zilog Z80

The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog and sold from July 1976 onwards. It was widely used both in desktop and embedded computer designs as well as for military purposes...

or Motorola 6809

Motorola 6809

The Motorola 6809 is an 8-bit microprocessor CPU from Motorola, designed by Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced 1978...

processors.

Japan

Research in Japan was shaped by the demands of the massive amount of Kanji

Kanji

Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...

characters used in Japanese script. With 1970s technology, the ability to generate of so many characters on demand in the end-user's terminal was seen as prohibitive. Instead, development focussed on methods to send pages to user terminals pre-rendered, using coding strategies similar to facsimile machines. This led to a videotex system called Captain

Captain (videotex)

The Captain system was a Japanese videotex system created by NTT. Announced in 1978, it was trialled from 1979 to 1981, with a second larger trial held from 1982 to 1983. The service launched commercially in 1983...

("Character and Pattern Telephone Access Information Network"), created by NTT

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone

, commonly known as NTT, is a Japanese telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Ranked the 31st in Fortune Global 500, NTT is the largest telecommunications company in Asia, and the second-largest in the world in terms of revenue....

in 1978, which went into full trials from 1979 to 1981. The system also lent itself naturally to photographic images, albeit at only moderate resolution. However, the pages typically took two or three times longer to load, compared to the European systems. NHK

NHK

NHK is Japan's national public broadcasting organization. NHK, which has always identified itself to its audiences by the English pronunciation of its initials, is a publicly owned corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee....

developed an experimental teletext system along similar lines, called CIBS ("Character Information Broadcasting Station"). Based on a 388×200 pixel resolution, it was first announced in 1976, and began trials in late 1978. (NHK's ultimate production teletext system launched in 1983).

Standards

Work to establish an international standard for videotex began in 1978 in CCITT. But the national delegations showed little interest in compromise, each hoping that their system would come to define what was perceived to be going to be an enormous new mass-market. In 1980 CCITT therefore issued recommendation S.100 (later T.100), noting the points of similarity but the essential incompatibility of the systems, and declaring all four to be recognised options.

Trying to kick-start the market AT&T

AT&T

AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

entered the fray, and in May 1981 announced its own Presentation Layer Protocol (PLP). This was closely based on the Canadian Telidon system, but added to it some further graphics primitives and a syntax for defining macros, algorithms to define cleaner pixel spacing for the (arbitrarily sizeable) text, and also dynamically redefinable characters and a mosaic block graphic character set, so that it could reproduce content from the French Antiope. After some further revisions this was adopted in 1983 as ANSI

Ansi

Ansi is a village in Kaarma Parish, Saare County, on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia....

standard X3.110, more commonly called NAPLPS

NAPLPS

NAPLPS is a graphics language for use originally with videotex and teletext services. NAPLPS was developed from the Telidon system developed in Canada, with a small number of additions from AT&T...

, the North American Presentation Layer Protocol Syntax. It was also adopted in 1988 as the presentation-layer syntax for NABTS

NABTS

NABTS, the North American Broadcast Teletext Specification, is a protocol used for encoding NAPLPS-encoded teletext pages, as well as other types of digital data, within the vertical blanking interval of an analog video signal...

, the North American Broadcast Teletext Specification.

Meanwhile, the European national Postal Telephone and Telegraph (PTT) agencies were also increasingly interested in videotex, and had convened discussions in European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations

European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations

The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations was established on June 26, 1959, as a coordinating body for European state telecommunications and postal organizations...

(CEPT) to co-ordinate developments, which had been diverging along national lines. As well as the British and French standards, the Swedes had proposed extending the British Prestel standard with a new set of smoother mosaic graphics characters; while the specification for the proposed German Bildschirmtext

Bildschirmtext

Bildschirmtext was a V.23 online service launched in West Germany in 1983 by the Deutsche Bundespost, the German postal service. Btx originally required special hardware, which had to be bought or rented from the post office...

(BTX) system, developed under contract by IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

Germany for Deutsche Bundespost

Deutsche Bundespost

The Deutsche Bundespost was created in 1947 as a successor to the Reichspost . Between 1947 and 1950 the enterprise was called Deutsche Post...

, was growing increasingly baroque. Originally conceived to follow the UK Prestel system, it had accreted elements from all the other European standards and more. This became the basis for setting out the CEPT recommendation T/CD 06-01, also proposed in May 1981. However, due to national pressure, CEPT stopped short of fixing a single standard, and instead recognised four "profiles": CEPT1, corresponding to the German BTX; CEPT 2, the French Minitel; CEPT 3, the British Prestel; and CEPT 4, the Swedish Prestel Plus. National videotex services were encouraged to follow one of the existing four basic profiles; or if they extended them, to do so in ways compatible with a "harmonised enhanced" specification. There was talk of upgrading Prestel to the full CEPT standard "within a couple of years". But in the event, it never happened. The German BTX eventually established CEPT1; the French Minitel continued with CEPT2, which was ready to roll out; and the British stayed with CEPT3, by now too established to break compatibility. The other countries of Europe adopted a patchwork of the different profiles.

In later years CEPT fixed a number of standards for extension levels to the basic service: for photographic images (based on JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

; T/TE 06-01, later revisions), for alpha-geometric graphics, similar to NAPLPS/Telidon (T/TE 06-02), for transferring larger data files and software (T/TE 06-03), for active terminal-side capabilities and scripting (T/TE 06-04), and for discovery of terminal capabilities (T/TE 06-05). But interest in them was limited.

CCITT T.101

UK

Prestel was somewhat popular for a time, but never gained anywhere near the popularity of Ceefax. This may have been due primarily to the relatively low penetration of suitable hardware in British homes, requiring the user to pay for the terminal (today referred to as a set-top box

Set-top box

A set-top box or set-top unit is an information appliance device that generally contains a tuner and connects to a television set and an external source of signal, turning the signal into content which is then displayed on the television screen or other display device.-History:Before the...

), a monthly charge for the service, and phone bills on top of that (unlike the US, local calls were paid for in most of Europe at that time). In the late 1980s the system was re-focused as a provider of financial data, and eventually bought out by the Financial Times in 1994. It continues today in name only, as FT's information service. A closed access videotex system based on the Prestel model was developed by the travel industry, and continues to be almost universally used by travel agents

Travel agency

A travel agency is a retail business that sells travel related products and services to customers on behalf of suppliers such as airlines, car rentals, cruise lines, hotels, railways, sightseeing tours and package holidays that combine several products...

throughout the country.

Using a prototype domestic television equipped with the Prestel chip set, Michael Aldrich

Michael Aldrich

—Michael Aldrich is an English inventor, innovator and entrepreneur. In 1979 he invented online shopping to enable online transaction processing between consumers and businesses, or between one business and another, a technique known later as e-commerce...

of Redifon Computers Ltd

Rediffusion

Rediffusion was a business which distributed radio and TV signals through wired relay networks. The business gave rise to a number of other companies, including Associated-Rediffusion, later known as Rediffusion London, one of the first companies to win a terrestrial ITV franchise in the UK...

demonstrated real-time transaction processing in 1979 and thus invented teleshopping or online shopping as it is now called. From 1980 onwards he designed, sold and installed systems with major UK companies including the world's first travel industry system,the world's first vehicle locator system for one of the world's largest auto manufacturers and the world's first supermarket system. He wrote a book about his ideas and systems which among other topics explored a future of teleshopping and teleworking that has proven to be prophetic. Before the IBM PC, Microsoft MS-DOS and the Internet/www, he invented and manufactured and sold the 'Teleputer', a PC that communicate using its Prestel chip set.

The Teleputer was a range of computers that were suffixed with a number. Only the Teleputer 1 and Teleputer 3 were manufactured and sold. The teleputer 1 was a very simple device and only worked as a teletex terminal, whereas the Teleputer 3 was a z80 based micro computer. It ran with a pair of single sided 5¼ inch floppy disk drive; a 20Mb Hard disk drive version was available towards the end of the product's life. The operating system was CP/M or a proprietary variant CP*, and the unit was supplied with a suite of applications, consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet, database and a semi-compiled basic programming language. The display supplied with the unit (both the Teleputer 1 and 3) was a modified Rediffusion 14 inch portable colour television, with the tuner circuitry removed and being driven by a RGB input. The unit had a 64Kb onboard memory which could be expanded to 128Kb with a plug in card. Graphics were the standard videotext (or teletext) resolution and colour, but a high resolution graphic card was also available. A 75/1200 baud modem was fitted as standard (could also run at 300/300 and 1200/1200), and connected to the telephone via an old style round telephone connector. In addition a IEEE interface card could be fitted. On the back of the unit there was a RS232 and Centronic connections and on the front was the connector for the keyboard.

The proposed Teleputer 4 & 5 were planned to have a laser disk attached and would allow the units to control video output on a separate screen.

North America

Interest in the UK trials did not go unnoticed in North America. In Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

the Department of Communications started a lengthy development program in the late 1970s that led to a graphical "second generation" service known as Telidon

Telidon

Telidon was a videotex/teletext service developed by the Canadian Communications Research Centre during the late 1970s and early 1980s...

. Telidon was able to deliver service using the vertical blanking interval of a TV signal or completely by telephone using a Bell 202

Bell 202 modem

The Bell 202 modem was an early modem developed by Bell System. It specifies audio frequency-shift keying to encode and transfer data at a rate of 1200 bits per second, half-duplex and at a rate of 1800 bits per second full duplex using differential phase-shift keying modulation...

style (split baud rate 150/1200) modem. The TV signal was used in a similar fashion to Ceefax, but used more of the available signal (due to differences in the signals between North America and Europe) for a data rate about 1200-bit/s. Some TV signal systems used a low-speed modem on the phone line for menu operation. The resulting system was rolled out in several test studies, all of which were failures.

The use of the 202 model modem, rather than one compatible with the existing DATAPAC

DATAPAC

DATAPAC was Canada's packet switched X.25-equivalent data network. Operated first by Trans-Canada Telephone System, then Telecom Canada, then the Stentor Alliance, it finally reverted to Bell Canada when the Stentor Alliance was dissolved.-Use:...

dial-up points such as the Bell 212, created severe limitations, as it made use of the nation-wide X.25

X.25

X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet switched wide area network communication. An X.25 WAN consists of packet-switching exchange nodes as the networking hardware, and leased lines, Plain old telephone service connections or ISDN connections as physical links...

packet network essentially out-of-bounds for Telidon-based services. There were also many widely held misperceptions concerning the graphics resolution and colour resolution that slowed business acceptance. Byte magazine once described it as "low resolution", when the coding system was, in fact, capable of 2²⁴ resolution in 8-byte mode. There was also a pronounced emphasis in government and Telco circles on "hardware decoding" even after very capable PC-based software decoders became readily available. This emphasis on special single-purpose hardware was yet another impediment to the widespread adoption of the system.

One of the earliest experiments with marketing videotex to consumers in the U.S.

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

was by Radio Shack

Radio shack

Radio shack is a slang term for a room or structure for housing radio equipment.-History:In the early days of radio, equipment was experimental and home-built. The first radio transmitters used a noisy spark to generate radio waves and were often housed in a garage or shed. When radio was first...

, which sold a consumer videotex terminal, essentially a single-purpose predecessor to the TRS-80 Color Computer

TRS-80 Color Computer

The Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer was a home computer launched in 1980. It was one of the earliest of the first generation of computers marketed for home use in English-speaking markets...

, in outlets across the country. Sales were anemic. Radio Shack later sold a videotex software and hardware package for the Color Computer.

In an attempt to capitalize on the European experience, a number of US-based media firms started their own videotex systems in the early 1980s. Among them were Knight-Ridder, the Los Angeles Times, and Field Enterprises in Chicago, which launched Keyfax. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram partnered with Radio Shack to launch StarText

StarText

StarText was an online ASCII-based computer service officially launched May 3, 1982 by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Tandy Corporation...

. (Radio Shack

Radio shack

is headquartered in Fort Worth).

Unlike the UK, however, the FCC

Federal Communications Commission

The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...

refused to set a single technical standard, so each provider could choose what it wished. Some selected Telidon (now standardized as NAPLPS

NAPLPS

NAPLPS is a graphics language for use originally with videotex and teletext services. NAPLPS was developed from the Telidon system developed in Canada, with a small number of additions from AT&T...

) but the majority decided to use slight-modified versions of the Prestel hardware. StarText used proprietary software developed at the Star-Telegram. Rolled out across the country from 1982 to 1984, all of the services quickly died and none, except StarText, remained after another two years. StarText remained in operation until the late 1990s, when it was moved to the web.

The primary problem was that the systems were simply too slow, operating on 300 baud modems connected to large minicomputers. After waiting several seconds for the data to be sent, users then had to scroll up and down to view the articles. Searching and indexing was not provided, so users often had to download long lists of titles before they could download the article itself. Furthermore, most of the same information was available in easy-to-use TV format on the air, or in general reference books at the local library, and didn't tie up your phone line. Unlike the Ceefax system where the signal was available for free in every TV, many U.S. systems cost hundreds of dollars to install, plus monthly fees of $30 or more.

In fact, the most successful online services of the period were not videotex services at all. Despite the promises that videotex would appeal to the mass market, the videotex services were comfortably out-distanced by Dow Jones News/Retrieval

Dow Jones News/Retrieval

Dow Jones News/Retrieval was an online service offered by Dow Jones & Company beginning in 1973, which greatly expanded its subscriber numbers during the 1980s...

(begun in 1973), CompuServe

CompuServe

CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...

and (somewhat further behind) The Source

The Source (service)

The Source was an early online service, one of the first such services to be oriented toward and available to the general public. The Source described itself as follows:...

, both begun in 1979. None were videotex services, nor did they use the fixed frame-by-frame videotex model for content. Instead all three used search functions and text interfaces to deliver files that were for the most part plain ASCII. Other ASCII-based services that became popular included Delphi (launched in 1983) and GEnie

GEnie

GEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users...

(launched in 1985).

Nevertheless, NAPLPS-based services were developed by several other joint partnerships between 1983 and 1987. These included:

Viewtron
Viewtron
Viewtron was an early online service offered by Knight-Ridder and AT&T. It started as a videotex service requiring users to have a special terminal, the AT&T Sceptre, then became a computer-based service as Commodore and other personal computers became important in the marketplace...

, a joint venture of Knight-Ridder and AT&T
Gateway, A service in Southern California by a joint venture of Times Mirror and InfoMart of Canada
Keyfax, A service in Chicago by Field Enterprises
Field Enterprises
Field Enterprises was a private holding company founded on August 31, 1944, by Marshall Field III and others whose main asset was the Chicago Sun. That same year the company acquired the book publishers Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books....

and Centel
Centel
Centel Corporation was an American telecommunications company, with primary interests in providing basic telephone service, cellular phone service and cable television service. It was founded in 1900 as an electric company....
Covidea, based in New York, set up by AT&T and Chemical Bank, with Time Inc. and Bank of America
Bank of America
Bank of America Corporation, an American multinational banking and financial services corporation, is the second largest bank holding company in the United States by assets, and the fourth largest bank in the U.S. by market capitalization. The bank is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina...
Grassroots Canada by InfoMart, Toronto
Teleguide, A kiosk-based service in Toronto by InfoMart and in San Francisco by The Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...

One of the early videotex providers, Trintex, a joint venture of AT&T-CBS completed a moderately successful trial of videotex use in the homes of Ridgewood, New Jersey. Trintex was merged with another joint venture that added Citibank to the AT&T-CBS partnership. Shortly later Sears bought into the partnership that in circa 1985 began to offer a service called Prodigy

Prodigy (ISP)

Prodigy Communications Corporation was an online service that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features.Initially subscribers...

, which used NAPLPS to send information to its users, right up until it turned into an Internet service provider in the late 1990s. Because of its relatively late debut, Prodigy was able to skip the intermediate step of persuading American consumers to attach proprietary boxes to their televisions; it was among the earliest proponents of computer-based videotex.

NAPLPS-based systems (Teleguide) were also used for an interactive Mall directory system in various locations including, the Worlds largest indoor mall, West Edmonton Mall (1985) and the Toronto Eaton Center. It was also used for an interactive multipoint audio-graphic educational teleconferencing system (1987) that predated today's shared interactive whiteboard systems such as those used by Blackboard and Desire2Learn.

Australia

Australia's national public Videotex service, Viatel, was launched by Telecom Australia

Telecom Australia

Telecom Australia was the trading name of the:* Australian Telecommunications Commission * Australian Telecommunications Corporation * Australian and Overseas Telecommunications Corporation...

on 28 February 1985. It was based on the British Prestel

Prestel

Prestel , the brand name for the UK Post Office's Viewdata technology, was an interactive videotex system developed during the late 1970s and commercially launched in 1979...

service. The service was later renamed Discovery 40, in reference to its 40 column screen format, as well as to distinguish it from another Telecom service, Discovery 80.

New Zealand

A private service known as TAARIS (Travel Agents Association Reservation and Information Service) was launched in New Zealand in 1985 for the Travel Agents Association of New Zealand by ICL Computers. This service used ICL's proprietary "Bulletin" software which was based on the Prestel standard but provided many additional facilities such as the ability to run additional software for specific applications. It also supported a proprietary email service.

The Netherlands

In the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

the then state-owned phone company PTT (now KPN

KPN

KPN is a Dutch landline and mobile telecommunications company, including both 2G and 3G mobile operations...

) operated two platforms: Viditel and Videotex Nederland.. From the user perspective the main difference between these systems was that Viditel used standard dial-in phone numbers where Videotex used premium-rate telephone number

Premium-rate telephone number

Premium-rate telephone numbers are telephone numbers for telephone calls during which certain services are provided, and for which prices higher than normal are charged. Unlike a normal call, part of the call charge is paid to the service provider, thus enabling businesses to be funded via the calls...

s. For Viditel you needed a (paid) subscription and on top of that you paid for each page you visited. For Videotex services you normally didn't need a subscription nor was there the need to authenticate: you paid for the services via the premium rate of the modem-connection based on connection time, regardless of the pages or services you retrieved.

From the information-provider point of view there were huge differences between Viditel and Videotex: Via Viditel all data was normally stored on the central computer(s) owned and managed by KPN: to update the information in the system you connected to the Viditel computer and via a terminal-emulation application you could edit the information.

But when using Videotex the information is on a computer-platform owned and managed by the information-provider. The Videotex system connected the end-user to the Datanet 1 line of the information-provider. It was up to the information provider if the access-point (the box directly behind the telephone line) supported the videotex protocol or that it was a transparent connection where the host handled the protocol.

As said the Videotex Nederland services offered access via several primary rate numbers

Premium-rate telephone number

and the information/service provider could choose the costs for accessing his service. Depending on the number used, the tariff could vary from ƒ 0,00 to ƒ 1,00 Dutch guilders (which is between €0.00 and € 0.45 euro

Euro

The euro is the official currency of the eurozone: 17 of the 27 member states of the European Union. It is also the currency used by the Institutions of the European Union. The eurozone consists of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,...

) per minute.

Besides these public available services, generally without authentication, there were also several private services using the same infrastructure but using their own access-phone numbers and dedicated access-points. As these services weren't public you had to log in to the infrastructure. The largest private networks were Travelnet which was an information and booking-system for the travel industry and RDWNet which was set-up for the automobile trade to register the outcome of MOT tests to the agency that officially issued the test-report. Later some additional services for the branch were added such as a service where the readings of the odometer

Odometer

An odometer or odograph is an instrument that indicates distance traveled by a vehicle, such as a bicycle or automobile. The device may be electronic, mechanical, or a combination of the two. The word derives from the Greek words hodós and métron...

could be registered each time a car was brought in for service. This was part of the Nationale Autopas Service and is now available via internet

The network of Videotex Nederland offered also directa ccess to most services of the French minitel

Minitel

system.

Minitel

With the French Minitel system, unlike any other service, the users were given an entire custom designed terminal

Computer terminal

A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...

for free. This was a deliberate move on the part of France Telecom, which reasoned that it would be cheaper in the long run to give away free terminals and teach its customers how to look up telephone listings on the terminal, instead of continuing to print and ship millions of phone books each year.

Once the network was in place, commercial services started to sprout up, becoming very popular in the mid-1980s. By 1990 tens of millions of terminals were in use. Like Prestel, Minitel used an asymmetric modem (1200-bit/s for downloading information to the terminal and 75-bit/s back).

Alex

Bell Canada

Bell Canada is a major Canadian telecommunications company. Including its subsidiaries such as Bell Aliant, Northwestel, Télébec, and NorthernTel, it is the incumbent local exchange carrier for telephone and DSL Internet services in most of Canada east of Manitoba and in the northern territories,...

introduced Minitel to Quebec as Alex

Alex (videotex service)

Alex was the name of an interactive videotex information service offered by Bell Canada in market research from 1988 to 1990 and thence to the general public until 1994....

in 1988, and Ontario two years later. It was available both as a standalone CRT

Cathode ray tube

The cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen used to view images. It has a means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam onto the fluorescent screen to create the images. The image may represent electrical waveforms , pictures , radar targets and...

terminal (very similar in design to Apple's eMac

EMac

The eMac, short for education Mac, was a Macintosh desktop computer made by Apple Inc. It was originally aimed at the education market, but was later made available as a cheaper mass market alternative to Apple's second-generation LCD display iMac....

) with 1200-bit/s modem, and as software-only for MS DOS computers. The system was received enthusiastically thanks to a free two-month introductory period, but fizzled within two years. Online fees were very high, and the useful services such as home banking, restaurant reservations, and news feeds, that Bell Canada

Bell Canada

advertised did not materialise; within a very short time the majority of content on Alex was of poor quality or very expensive chat lines. The Alex terminals did double duty for connecting to text-only BBS

Bulletin board system

es.

Minitel in Brazil

A very successful system was started in São Paulo

São Paulo

São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...

, Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

, by then state-owned Telesp

Telesp

Telefônica Brasil is a brazilian telecommunications company subsidiary of Spanish Telefónica. The company was originally formed as part of Telebrás, the state-owned telecom monopoly at the time. In 1998, Telebrás was demerged and privatized, with Telefónica taking Telesp. From that time, Telesp...

(Telecomunicações de São Paulo). It was called Videotexto and operated from 1982 to the mid-nineties; a few other state telephone companies followed Telesp's lead, but each state kept standalone databases and services. The key to its success was that the phone company offered only the service and phone subscriber databases and third parties—banks, database providers, newspapers—offered additional content and services. The system peaked at 70 thousand subscribers around 1995.

Comparison to the Internet today

Some people confuse videotex with the Internet. Although early videotex providers in the 1970s encountered many issues similar to those faced by Internet service providers 20 years later, it is important to emphasize that the two technologies evolved separately and reflect fundamentally different assumptions about how to computerize communications.

The Internet in its mature form (after 1990) is highly decentralized in that it is essentially a federation of thousands of service providers whose mutual cooperation makes everything run, more or less. Furthermore, the various hardware and software components of the Internet are designed, manufactured and supported by thousands of different companies. Thus, completing any given task on the Internet, such as retrieving a webpage, relies on the contributions of hundreds of people at a hundred or more distinct companies, each of which may have only very tenuous connections with each other.

In contrast, videotex was always highly centralized (except in the French Minitel service, also including thousands of information providers running their own servers connected to the packet switched network "TRANSPAC"). Even in videotex networks where third-party companies could post their own content and operate special services like forums, a single company usually owned and operated the underlying communications network, developed and deployed the necessary hardware and software, and billed both content providers and users for access.The exception was the transaction processing videotex system developed in the UK by Michael Aldrich in 1979, which brought teleshopping (or online shopping as it was later called) into prominence and was the idea developed later through the Internet. Aldrich's systems were based on minicomputers that could communicate with multiple mainframes. Many systems were installed in the UK including the world's first supermarket teleshopping system.
Nearly all books and articles (in English) from videotex's heyday (the late 1970s and early 1980s) seem to reflect a common assumption that in any given videotex system, there would be a single company that would build and operate the network. Although this appears shortsighted in retrospect, it is important to realize that communications had been perceived as a natural monopoly

Natural monopoly

A monopoly describes a situation where all sales in a market are undertaken by a single firm. A natural monopoly by contrast is a condition on the cost-technology of an industry whereby it is most efficient for production to be concentrated in a single form...

for almost a century — indeed, in much of the world, telephone networks were then and still are explicitly operated as a government monopoly. The Internet as we know it today was still in its infancy in the 1970s, and was mainly operated on telephone lines owned by AT&T

AT&T

which were leased by ARPA

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military...

. At the time, AT&T did not take seriously the threat posed by packet switching

Packet switching

Packet switching is a digital networking communications method that groups all transmitted data – regardless of content, type, or structure – into suitably sized blocks, called packets. Packet switching features delivery of variable-bit-rate data streams over a shared network...

; it actually turned down the opportunity to take over ARPANET

ARPANET

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...

. Other computer networks at the time were not really decentralized; for example, the private network Tymnet

Tymnet

Tymnet was an international data communications network headquartered in San Jose, California that used virtual call packet switched technology and X.25, SNA/SDLC, ASCII and BSC interfaces to connect host computers at thousands of large companies, educational institutions, and government agencies....

had central control computers called supervisors which controlled each other in an automatically determined hierarchy. It would take another decade of hard work to transform the Internet from an academic toy into the basis for a modern information utility.

Definitions

Definitions of Videotex and associated terms. These definitions were written in 1980 so some names may be out of date.

Videotex: The generic term used, but not formally approved (at the end of 1979), by CCITT for a two-way interactive service emphasizing information retrieved, and capable of displaying pages of text and pictorial material on the screens of adapted TVs.
Viewdata
Viewdata
Viewdata is a Videotex implementation. It is a type of information retrieval service in which a subscriber can access a remote database via a common carrier channel, request data and receive requested data on a video display over a separate channel. Samuel Fedida was credited as inventor of the...

: An alternative term to videotex, used in particular by the British Post Office and generally in Britain and the USA. Elsewhere, the term videotex is preferred. Viewdata was coined by the BPO in the early 1970s, but found to be unacceptable as a trade name, hence its use as a generic.
Teletext
Teletext
Teletext is a television information retrieval service developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. It offers a range of text-based information, typically including national, international and sporting news, weather and TV schedules...

: A generic term used to describe one-way broadcast information services for displaying pages of text and pictorial material on the screens of adapted TVs. A limited choice of information pages is continuously cycled at the broadcasting station. By means of a keypad, a user can select one page at a time for display from the cycle. The information is transmitted in digital form usually using spare capacity in the broadcast TV signal. Careful design can ensure that there is no interference with the normal TV picture. Alternatively, it can use the full capacity of a dedicated channel. Compared with two-way videotex, teletext is inherently more limited, though generally less costly.
Teletex
Teletex
Teletex was an ITU-T specification for a text and document communications service that could be provided over telephone lines. Teletex allowed for the transmission and routing of Group 4 facsimile documents...

: A text communication standard for communicating word processors and similar terminals combining the facilities of office typewriters and text editing.
Ceefax
Ceefax
Ceefax is the BBC's teletext information service transmitted via the analogue signal, started in 1974 and will run until April 2012 for Pages from Ceefax, while the actual interactive service will run until 24 October 2012, in-line with the digital switchover.-History:During the late 60s, engineer...

("See facts"): The BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

's name for its public teletext service available on two TV channels using spare capacity.
Oracle
ORACLE (teletext)
ORACLE was a commercial teletext service first broadcast on ITV in 1974 and later on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, finally ending on both channels at 23:59 GMT on 31 December 1992....

("Optional recognition of coded line electronics"): The name of the IBA's
Independent Broadcasting Authority
The Independent Broadcasting Authority was the regulatory body in the United Kingdom for commercial television - and commercial/independent radio broadcasts...

equivalent teletext service.
Bildschirmtext
Bildschirmtext
Bildschirmtext was a V.23 online service launched in West Germany in 1983 by the Deutsche Bundespost, the German postal service. Btx originally required special hardware, which had to be bought or rented from the post office...

, DataVision, Bulletin, Captain
Captain (videotex)
The Captain system was a Japanese videotex system created by NTT. Announced in 1978, it was trialled from 1979 to 1981, with a second larger trial held from 1982 to 1983. The service launched commercially in 1983...

, Teletel, Prestel
Prestel
Prestel , the brand name for the UK Post Office's Viewdata technology, was an interactive videotex system developed during the late 1970s and commercially launched in 1979...

, Viewtron
Viewtron
Viewtron was an early online service offered by Knight-Ridder and AT&T. It started as a videotex service requiring users to have a special terminal, the AT&T Sceptre, then became a computer-based service as Commodore and other personal computers became important in the marketplace...

, etc.: The proprietary names for specific videotex implementations.

External links

David Carlson, The Online Timeline: 1980s, University of Florida

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

United Kingdom

France

Canada

Japan

Standards

UK

North America

Australia

New Zealand

The Netherlands

Minitel

Alex

Minitel in Brazil

Comparison to the Internet today

Definitions

See also

Further reading

External links