Videotex is a system for sending of pages of text to a user in computer form, typically to be displayed on a television.

Videotex in its broader definition can be used to refer to any such service; including the Internet, bulletin board systems, online service providers and even the arrival/departure displays at an airport. In a more limited definition, it refers only to two-way information services, as opposed to one-way services such as teletext. However, unlike the modern Internet, all traditional videotex services were highly centralized. A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer system running software that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as downloading software and data, uploading data, playing games, reading news, and exchanging messages with other users. ... Teletext is an information retrieval service provided by television broadcast companies. ...

History

The first attempt at a general-purpose videotex service were created in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s. In about 1970 the BBC had a brainstorming session in which it was decided to start researching ways to send closed captioning 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. Meanwhile the General Post Office (soon to become British Telecom) was researching a similar concept since the late 1960s, known as Viewdata. 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. ITV soon joined the fray with a Ceefax-clone known as ORACLE. The 1960s, or The Sixties, in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969, but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past twenty years. ... The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was formed in 1927 by means of a royal charter. ... Closed captioning (CC) allows deaf and hard of hearing / hearing-impaired people, people learning English as an additional language, people first learning how to read, and others to read a transcript of the audio portion of a video, film, or other presentation. ... Ceefax (phonetic for See Facts) is the BBCs teletext information service. ... The term General Post Office is used by a number of postal administrations worldwide. ... BT Group plc (which trades as just BT, and is commonly known by its former name, British Telecom) is the privatised former British state telecommunications operator. ... In telecommunication, a viewdata is a Videotex implementation, a type of information-retrieval service in which a subscriber can (a) access a remote database via a common carrier channel, (b) request data, and (c) receive requested data on a video display over a separate channel. ... Prestel, the brand name for the British General Post Offices Viewdata technology, was an interactive videotex system launched in 1979. ... ORACLE (Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics) was a commercial teletext service broadcast on ITV and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom from 1974 to 1992. ...

In 1974 all of the services sat down and created a standard for displaying the information. The display would be a simple 40x24 grid of text, with some graphics characters for constructing simple graphics. This standard was called CEPT1. 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. Ceefax first started operation in 1977 with a limited 30 pages, followed quickly by ORACLE and then Prestel in 1979. CEPT1 was a standard set in 1974 by the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) for the display of Videotex. ... Teletext is an information retrieval service provided by television broadcast companies. ... 1977 was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1977 calendar). ... 1979 is a common year starting on Monday. ...

Prestel was somewhat popular for a time, but never gained anywhere near the popularity of Ceefax. This was due primarily to it delivering much the same content, yet requiring the user to pay for the terminal (today referred to as a set-top box), a monthly charge, and phone bills on top of that (even local calls are paid for in most of Europe). Although Prestel's two-way features (including e-mail) were interesting, the end-users appeared to be unwilling to pay much for such a service, not as much as it cost to run it at least. 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 throughout the country. The term set-top box describes a device that connects to a television and some external source of signal, and turns the signal into content then displayed on the screen. ... // Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 60s and 70s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ... A travel agency is a store where individuals or families go to buy travel packages. ...

North America

Interest in the UK trials did not go unnoticed in North America. In Canada the Department of Communications started a lengthy development program in the late 1970s that led to a "second generation" service known as Telidon. Telidon split the data flow in two, using both the TV signal and the telephone. 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, while using 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. This article provides extensive lists of events and significant personalities of the 1970s. ... NAPLPS (North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax) is a graphics language for use originally with videotex services. ...

Apparently unwilling to learn from these problems, a number of US based media firms jumped on the videotex bandwagon in the early 1980s. Unlike the UK however, the FCC refused to set a single technical standard, so each provider could choose what they wished. Some selected Telidon (now standardized as NAPLPS) but the majority decided to use slight-modified versions of the Prestel hardware. Rolled out across the country from 1982 to 1984, all of the services quickly died and none remained after another two years. US,Us or us may stand for the United States of America us, the oblique case form of the English language pronoun we. ... The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency, created, directed, and empowered by Congressional statute. ... NAPLPS (North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax) is a graphics language for use originally with videotex services. ...

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. HP2114 minicomputer Minicomputer is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems (mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). ...

For many years, the Prodigy online service did use NAPLPS to send information to its users, right up until it turned into an Internet service provider in the late 1990s, but avoided calling itself a videotex service so that it would not be tainted by all the business failures linked to that name. Also, by the time Prodigy belatedly went online in 1987, personal computers had become well-entrenched in American homes. Unlike the early European videotex providers back in the 1970s, Prodigy was able to skip the intermediate step of persuading American consumers to attach proprietary boxes to their televisions. Prodigy Communications Corporation operated a dialup service (a sort of mega-BBS) for home computers in the United States before the advent of the Internet. ... // Events and trends The 1990s are generally classified as having moved slightly away from the more conservative 1980s, but keeping the same mind-set. ... 1987 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Minitel

With the French Minitel system, unlike any other service, the users were given an entire custom designed terminal 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. Minitel 1. ... A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device. ...

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 bps for downloading information to the terminal and 75 bps back).

Bell Canada introduced Minitel to Quebec as Alex in 1988, and Ontario two years later. It was available both as a standalone CRT terminal (very similar in design to Apple's eMac) with 1200 bps 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 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 BBSes. Bell Canada Enterprises (TSX: BCE) (NYSE: BCE) is a major telecommunications company and a provider of telephone services in Canada. ... This article is about the Apple Macintosh computer model. ... Bell Canada Enterprises (TSX: BCE) (NYSE: BCE) is a major telecommunications company and a provider of telephone services in Canada. ... A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer system running software that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as downloading software and data, uploading data, playing games, reading news, and exchanging messages with other users. ...

A very successful system was started in São Paulo, Brazil, by then state-owned Telesp (Telecomunicações de São Paulo). It 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. Landmark buildings Edifício Italia (at left) and Copan (curved façade at center), in São Paulo Downtown. ...

CEPT

The Germans took the CEPT1 concept and expanded it so it was somewhat more flexible, the resulting standard was called CEPT2.

In Germany, the system was named BTX (Bildschirmtext [Engl: "screen text"]). Bildschirmtext (German screen text, abbrev. ...

After that the French went one step further and developed CEPT3 that would be used for their popular Minitel system.

None of the CEPT standards used high resolution graphics. The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) was established on June 26, 1959 as a coordinating body for European state telecommunications and postal organizations. ...

Comparison to the Internet today

Many people often 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. This article provides extensive lists of events and significant personalities of the 1970s. ...

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 this article from Wikipedia) 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. 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.

Nearly all books and articles 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 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 which were leased by ARPA. At the time, AT&T did not take seriously the threat posed by packet switching; it actually turned down the opportunity to take over ARPANET. Other computer networks at the time were not really decentralized; for example, the private network Tymnet 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. This article provides extensive lists of events and significant personalities of the 1970s. ... // Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 60s and 70s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ... In economics, a natural monopoly exists when production of a particular product can be done cheapest when there is only one firm doing the producing. ... AT&T (formerly an abbreviation for American Telephone and Telegraph) Corporation (NYSE: T) is an American telecommunications company. ... The acronym ARPA has several meanings: It is the former abbreviation of a U.S. military organization now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). ... In computer networking and telecommunications, packet switching is a communications paradigm in which packets (messages or fragments of messages) are individually routed between nodes, with no previously established communication path. ... ARPANET logical map, March 1977. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...