Videotex

During the 1980s there was a worldwide phenomenon known as Videotex. Videotex combined three technologies: the television, the telephone and the computer. The combination produced a two-way interactive system for anyone who could afford to use the technology. Using Videotex anyone could obtain information on a variety of subjects ranging from news, sports, to train timetables, and financial data. Anyone could also send and receive electronic messages, book holidays, conduct electronic banking, and download software.

Many countries including Canada, the US, Japan, and several European countries such as France and Germany developed public Videotex services based on the concept that had been invented by Sam Fedida, an engineer with British Telecom. Sam while not the first to propose an information and communication network for anyone (this honor goes to Ted Nelson with his Xanadu concept), but Sam was the first to implement the system on a large scale in Britain during the 1970s. Three of the best known of these were Prestel in the United Kingdom, Télétel in France and Telidon in Canada.

Prestel vs. Minitel

Prestel

The technology, which was British Telecom's Videotex suffered from slow connection speed, non-scrolling screens with very little space for text, blocky graphics, hierarchical menus, rather than clickable links, and most especially from dead ends - the service providers rarely provided for on-line feedback. In Britain, the service remained expensive and failed to achieve the critical mass, which would have made it worthwhile. There was also the problem the personal computer market had not settled on PCs or Macs and Videotex was not cross-platform. If you didn't have a computer, which could handle Videotex, the only option was to buy a dedicated Prestel keyboard and connect it to your TV. So Prestel died off, though not without leaving behind it a number of enthusiasts, who had glimpsed of the potential of on-line communication.

Minitel

The French Minitel, which was based on the same Videotex system as that established in Britain. The main and most crucial difference between the French and British systems was in the response of the respective governments. The French threw themselves into the project, offering every telephone subscriber the option of a dedicated Minitel terminal instead of the conventional phone book. Shortly after the Minitel was launch, it was opened up to private service providers who enthusiastic used the Minitel terminal. The French subscribers embraced Minitel for messaging and chat lines, which quickly became specialized in sexual content. French Telecom discovered in the early eighties that subscribers were ringing up the speaking clock in the middle of the night and conducting sexy conversations with others who were also connected, so the market was clearly there, ready to take off.

Whether it is possible to draw from these two systems any conclusions about the likely development of the Internet. Conceivably, we might conclude from comparing the British and French experiences that a critical mass has to be achieved if the system is to succeed this requires government support and investment the system needs to be open to private service providers if it is to be perceived as useful the system needs to provide people with the opportunity to satisfy their communication needs without paternalist censorship

Videotex / BTX

The concept of Videotex was based on a simple observation that most families have a TV set and a telephone. Thus why not use the telephone to access services in a network of computers and use the TV set as display? The only additional components needed would be a "decoder" to display the information transmitted and a modem to connect to the service provider.

Videotex being renamed Prestel provided 24 lines of 40 characters on the TV screen. Using only 16 colors and a large set of special "mosaic" characters, which consisted of little colored rectangles of 3 wide by 2 high. Prestel provided for the display of appealing textual and graphical information. The presentation while primitive in comparison to today’s high resolution graphics was infinitely better than what we see now, some 20 years later, on WAP cellular telephones used for WWW browsing. Prestel did have limitations, but it had features that are still missing in today’s WWW.

Two developments of Videotex which are particularly worth mentioning.

The graphic limitations of Prestel lead to the proposal of a new European standard "CEPT Videotex" that included features unusual for the early eighties such as e.g. 4096 colors, dynamically definable character sets with optional "geometric graphics" as we now have it in all advanced graphic systems. Some of the elements in the CEPT standard that sound odd like 32 flashing frequencies of different intensity were introduced as an attempt to make sure that non-European computers like the then popular Commodore64 or the Apple II would not be able to handle Videotex, hence allowing European IT industry to catch up behind the "shield" of the standard. This attempt failed as a number of countries kept sticking to the original Prestel standard, and the French introduced their own version "Minitel". Germany was quite successful with its "Bildschirmtext" (BTX) version, but eventually had to gracefully merge it with the WWW.

The French Minitel was pushed very aggressively. Many Minitel terminals (usually black and white but with full keyboard) were distributed free to millions of households instead of printed telephone directories. This was partially successful: at some stage in the early nineties over 7 million Minitel users had the feeling that living without Minitel was getting difficult. However, even Minitel could not withstand the pressure from PCs and the WWW.

Summary

In summary, Videotex should be seen an early version of the WWW. While WWW is still lacking some features of the early Videotex systems, it is superior in many other aspects and has turned out to be the winner.

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