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116-529: Telidon (from the Greek words τῆλε, tele "at a distance" and ἰδών, idon "seeing") was a videotex / teletext service developed by the Canadian Communications Research Centre (CRC) during the late 1970s and supported by commercial enterprises led by Infomart in the early 1980s. Most work on the system ended after 1985, having failed to build critical mass. The CRC referred to Telidon as

232-460: A Toronto -based company set up to provide Telidon content. It was hosted on two computers set up in Winnipeg and run by MTS, providing a 4800 baud channel to the in-home terminals. Originally scheduled for January 1980, delays pushed this back to mid-year. Ida ran until 1981, when most of the services were dropped and the cables returned to normal analog signals, although an offshoot using optical cable

348-650: A ribbon cable . With the hardware in place, the CRC started working with telecommunications providers to test the system in production settings. Many of the major Canadian carriers expressed strong interest, and a number of test systems were ready to roll out by the early 1980s. Excitement was high; the 19 November 1981 issue of The Globe and Mail quoted a representative at the Canadian Computer Show and Conference in Toronto claiming that "Telidon may become as commonly used as

464-589: A telephone . The link is achieved through converting electric signals from the phone line to sound and reconverting sound to electric signals needed for the end terminal, such as a teletypewriter, and back, rather than through direct electrical connection . Prior to its breakup in 1984, Bell System 's legal monopoly over telephony in the United States allowed the company to impose strict rules on how consumers could access their network. Customers were prohibited from connecting equipment not made or sold by Bell to

580-513: 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

696-482: A "macro". The former provided not only or international characters, but also for the creation of small graphics that could be sent with a low transmission cost, which is useful in certain roles where the graphics can be arranged in a grid, like a chessboard. The later allowed the programmers to create a commonly used graphical element, the AT&;T logo for instance, and save it to a macro. The graphic can then be recreated with

812-638: A "second generation" videotex system, offering improved performance, 2D colour graphics, multilingual support and a number of different interactivity options supported on various hardware. With additional features added by AT&T Corporation , and 16 other contributors in North America and supported by the Federal Government, Telidon was redefined as a protocol and became the NAPLPS standard. A number of Telidon systems were rolled out, including GRASSROOTS for

928-495: 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

1044-613: A bringer of novelty, and enhancer of life. After all, there was a revolution taking place – the communications revolution. So we were told. In a radio broadcast in 1980, Douglas Parkhill , the deputy minister of research at the DoC outlined some of the potential uses, from financial information, to theatre reservations, with the ability to pay and print out tickets from the system. The release of Norpac's Telidon terminal led to announcements by broadcasters and news organizations who would be rolling out test systems starting late that year. However,

1160-499: A centralised service and individual service providers could connect to it via the Eirpac packet switching network. It could also connect to databases on other networks such as French Minitel services, European databases and university systems. The system was also the first platform in Ireland to offer users access to e-mail outside of a corporate setting. Despite being cutting edge for its time,

1276-586: A commercial marketplace for Telidon systems and content, running for another year. One of the longest-lived Telidon deployments was "Project Grassroots", a follow-on to the services developed as part of the earlier Project Ida and run on its machines in Winnipeg. Unlike Ida, Grassroots ran on geographically distributed modems instead of cable links and was aimed specifically at farmers, providing weather reports, agrochemicals notices and other information, as well as optional links to live commodities pricing on various exchanges. Prices were high: in addition to purchasing

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1392-588: A consumer videotex terminal, essentially a single-purpose predecessor to the TRS-80 Color Computer , 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,

1508-526: 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 or Motorola 6809 processors. Research in Japan was shaped by the demands of the large number of Kanji characters used in Japanese script. With 1970s technology,

1624-522: A moderately successful trial of videotex use in the homes of Ridgewood, New Jersey, leveraging technology developed at Bell Labs. After the trial in Ridgewood AT&;T and CBS parted company. Subsequently, CBS partnered with IBM and Sears, Roebuck, and Company to form Trintex. Around 1985, this entity began to offer a service called Prodigy , which used NAPLPS to send information to its users, right up until it turned into an Internet service provider in

1740-838: A news service, but over time included more and more features. As it operated over modems in a pure videotex format, it was able to offer a variety of two-way services including e-mail and bulletin boards. A similar system was "Gateway", run by AT&T and the Los Angeles Times . In 1984 Tribune Media Services (TMS) and the Associated Press operated a cable television channel called "AP News Plus" that provided NAPLPS-based news screens to cable television subscribers in many U.S. cities. The news pages were created and edited by TMS staffers working on an Atex editing system in Orlando, Florida, and sent by satellite to NAPLPS decoder devices located at

1856-443: A one-way medium for some time. A common use was to use Telidon terminals to produce video that was then broadcast for viewing as closed-circuit television signals to conventional televisions, rather than sending the digital information to terminals connected to those televisions. Systems like this were common for informational displays in airports and other public areas, as well as information displays for cable TV stations. Rather than

1972-485: 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 ; 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

2088-523: 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

2204-453: 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 to develop an interactive graphics terminal that could decode

2320-617: A single instruction in any page that needed it. The resulting system emerged in early 1983 as NAPLPS , while the transmission method that encoded information into the vertical blank interrupt of a TV signal became the NABTS standard. Major articles in Byte Magazine introduced the NAPLPS system to a wider audience, spread over a four-month period in the February, March, April, and May 1983 issues. With

2436-636: A smaller modem-based test in the Calgary area. A month later, Bell Canada announced their "Vista" project in Toronto and Montreal, in partnership with the Toronto Star and the Southam Press who would provide content. This test eventually expanded to between 500 and 1000 terminals. Telidon generated interest outside Canada as well. A major foreign sale was made in July 1980 to the government of Venezuela, who set up

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2552-568: A suitable approach and this resulted in D. Carlisle's resignation with severe impact on Infomart, the flagship of Telidon in rough seas. The government's funding of the Telidon efforts came to an official end on 31 March 1985, at which point $ 69 million had been spent not counting the revenue expended by Infomart who had made national and international sales in excess of $ 20M. It was estimated that another $ 200 million had been invested by various industry partners, $ 100 million of that by Bell Canada. Most of

2668-455: A team at the CRC started working on a "Picture Description Instruction" (PDI) format to encode vector graphics information. An interpreter, the "Interactive Graphics Programming Language" (IGPL), read the PDI codes and rasterized them for display. By this time the team consisted of Bown, Doug O'Brien, Bill Sawchuck, J.R. Storey and Bob Warburton. As the work continued, the team decided that locking

2784-454: A television signal. All such systems are occasionally referred to as viewdata . 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 teletext , the Internet , bulletin board systems , online service providers , and even the arrival/departure displays at an airport. This usage

2900-469: A terminal there was an additional one-time $ 100 set-up fee, the annual fee was $ 150, and there was a $ 19.00/hr charge to connect to the service, and another $ 6.00/hr for "communications". Nevertheless, Grassroots grew into a system that distributed 20,000 pages of information to farmers created by Infomart. Based in Winnipeg , Grassroots expanded to serve Alberta , Saskatchewan , northern Ontario , and in 1985,

3016-470: 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

3132-699: A test system to provide information on health, social and economic aid programs to people moving into Caracas from rural areas. A number of U.S. companies also expressed an interest, and started plans for their own Telidon-based teletext systems. As early as 1978, AT&T Corporation and CBS had been experimenting with the idea of a videotex service, and were drawn towards the Telidon efforts. In 1982 they introduced an experimental system known as "Venture One" in Ridgewood, New Jersey , equipping some homes with standalone terminals from AT&T, and others with set-top boxes. The test ran for seven months from 1982 to 83, and

3248-597: A usable online experience that Telidon failed to offer. For all of these reasons, interest in Telidon, and Videotex in general, quickly faded. One reason was the issue of continued funding which the Government hoped would come from private publishing companies such as The Globe and Mail, or The Toronto Star as most likely candidates. During the latter part of 1983 and early 1984 of the Informart CEO Dave Carlisle's reign, private publishing corporations couldn't find

3364-475: A variety of delays pushed back most of these programs into 1980. The race to have the first operational deployment was won by the small town of South Headingley , just west of Winnipeg , part of an experimental system being deployed by the Manitoba Telephone System (MTS), the local cable operator. Named for Ida Cates, Manitoba's first woman telephone operator in the 1880s, "Project Ida" was part of

3480-508: A videotex service. Unlike the systems being developed in Europe and in Japan, the Canadian system would offer high-quality 2D graphics, higher speed, and could be used for one-way fixed or menued displays (teletext), two-way systems based on modems (videotex), or they could combine the two, allowing information to be sent to the customer in the video signal, and returned via modem. On 15 August 1978,

3596-451: A wider rollout of advanced cable technologies that MTS had been planning since 1978 to study ways to use up the bandwidth capabilities of newer cable systems. Services included Telidon, cable telephony , pay TV service using outdoor converters (instead of set top boxes), and low-bandwidth backchannel data services for gas and electrical billing and alarm services. The Telidon services that formed part of Project Ida were created by Infomart,

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3712-411: Is difficult to maintain. While large Telidon deployments might hold tens of thousands of pages, users were able to quickly exhaust the content in their particular areas of interest, suggesting that systems would have to contain hundreds of thousands of pages in order to remain interesting for longer periods. As Gordon Thompson of Bell-Northern Research put it, "all of the excitement is in the expectation;

3828-512: Is no longer common. With the exception of Minitel 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. The first attempts at a general-purpose videotex service were created in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s. In about 1970

3944-420: Is prominently shown early in the 1983 film WarGames , when character David Lightman (portrayed by actor Matthew Broderick ) places a telephone handset into the cradle of a prop acoustic modem to accentuate the act of using telephone lines for interconnection to the developing computer networks of the period—in this case, a military command computer. The earliest major motion picture depicting an acoustic coupler

4060-441: The 'Teleputer' , a PC that communicated 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 microcomputer . It ran with a pair of single sided 5 1 ⁄ 4  inch floppy disk drive;

4176-615: The BBC had a brainstorming session in which it was decided to start researching ways to send closed captioning information to the 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 ) had been researching

4292-714: The Carterfone further allowed any device not harmful to the system to be connected directly to the AT&T network. This decision enabled the proliferation of later innovations like answering machines , fax machines, and modems . When inventors began developing devices to send non-voice signals over a telephone line, the need for a workaround for the Bell restrictions was apparent. As early as 1937, telefax machines used by newspapers were using some kind of couplers, possibly acoustic but more likely magnetic for single-directional communication. Multiplexed bidirectional telephone coupling

4408-661: The Danish Post and Telegraph . The Canadian government also invested in Telidon as a way of distributing graphical information. Transport Canada ran a system called "TABS" that installed terminals in many airports, where pilots could quickly look up weather information and NOTAMs . Statistics Canada also used Telidon as a way to distribute graphs and other information in their CANSIM system using their TELICHART software that converted tables of data into NAPLPS commands. Environment Canada used Telidon terminals to produce video feeds that could then be broadcast on local cable feeds. In

4524-702: The Los Angeles Times , and Field Enterprises in Chicago, which launched Keyfax. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram partnered with Radio Shack to launch StarText ( Radio Shack was headquartered in Fort Worth). Unlike the UK, however, the FCC refused to set a single technical standard, so each provider could choose what it wished. Some selected Telidon (now standardized as NAPLPS ) but the majority decided to use slight-modified versions of

4640-622: 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. None, except StarText, remained in operation after two years from their respective launch dates. 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

4756-518: The Prodigy online service and some bulletin boards . Telidon had a lasting legacy on the hardware side; its NABTS communications system found re-use years later in WebTV for Windows . Herb Bown is widely considered to be the "father" of Telidon. Bown had been working in the computer graphics field since the late 1960s, originally using plotters but later moving to video systems. Starting in 1970, Bown and

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4872-457: The "next big thing". Comments to the effect that "Within the next few decades, people may be able to access much of the published information in the world from their living rooms by using videotex," were common in the trade press. The CRC was able to interest the Department of Communications (DoC), their superiors within the federal government, to fund development of their system into the basis for

4988-581: 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 (BTX) system, developed under contract by IBM Germany for Deutsche Bundespost , was growing increasingly baroque. Originally conceived to follow the UK Prestel system, it had accreted elements from all

5104-587: 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. 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 (begun in 1973), CompuServe and (somewhat further behind) The Source , both begun in 1979. None were videotex services, nor did they use

5220-623: The DoC (whose technical side is now part of the Industry Canada ) held a press conference and formally announced the Telidon project to the public, demonstrating a large video display sending information to a minicomputer over an acoustic coupler modem . They outlined a four-year development plan that included funding for further technical development at the CRC, the production of several hundred terminals that would be lent out to industry for development studies, as well as funds for marketing and lobbying in videotex standards negotiations. In 1979

5336-595: The DoC formed the Canadian Videotex Consultative Committee to advise the Minister on ways to commercialize the CRC's work, and develop videotext services within Canada. The committee held four meetings during the initial four-year development plan, and coordinated a number of field trials with broadcasters, telephone companies, cable television firms, manufacturers and various information providers. During

5452-619: The French CCETT research centre was based, for use as telephone directories. The trial was a success, and in 1982 Minitel was rolled out nationwide. Since 1970, researchers at the Communications Research Centre (CRC) in Ottawa 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

5568-567: The French Minitel system was introduced to Ireland by eircom (then called Telecom Éireann) in 1988. The system was based on the French model and Irish services were even accessible from France via the code "3619 Irlande." A number of major Irish businesses came together to offer a range of online services, including directory information, shopping, banking, hotel reservations, airline reservations, news, weather and information services. It wasn't

5684-943: The French Antiope. After some further revisions this was adopted in 1983 as ANSI standard X3.110, more commonly called NAPLPS , the North American Presentation Layer Protocol Syntax. It was also adopted in 1988 as the presentation-layer syntax for NABTS , 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 (CEPT) to co-ordinate developments, which had been diverging along national lines. As well as

5800-552: The German CEPT-1 standard, used in the German Bildschirmtext . In Canada , 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 was able to deliver service using the vertical blanking interval of a TV signal or completely by telephone using a Bell 202 style (split baud rate 150/1200 ) modem. The TV signal

5916-519: The Prestel model was developed by the travel industry, and continues to be almost universally used by travel agents throughout the country. Using a prototype domestic television equipped with the Prestel chip set, Michael Aldrich of Redifon Computers Ltd demonstrated a real-time transaction processing in 1979; the idea is currently referred to as online shopping . Starting in 1980, he designed, sold and installed systems with major UK companies including

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6032-765: The Province of Manitoba, SOI for Venezuela, Compuserve , LA Times in California, EPIC for General Motors, NOVATEX for Teleglobe Canada and the Swiss PTT nationwide application. These failed to demonstrate compelling functionality, and the auxiliary equipment costs remained high. Eventually, on 31 March 1985, the Canadian government support for the project ended and the various commercial services based on it closed shortly thereafter. Telidon saw limited use after that, in niches like informational displays in airports and similar environments. NAPLPS did appear in several other products, notably

6148-644: The Toronto area, "Teleguide" terminals were common fixtures at larger shopping malls, government buildings (e.g. Scarborough Civic Centre ) and notably the Toronto Eaton Centre . Run by London, Ontario 's Cableshare, the system relied on an 8085-based microcomputer which drove several NAPLPS terminals fitted with touch screens, all communicating via Datapac to a back-end database. The system offered news, weather and sports information along with shopping mall guides and coupons. Rollouts were announced in several other cities as well. The largest efforts were made in

6264-513: The United States. After the Venture One experiments in 1982/3, AT&T decided not to pursue a videotex service of its own, but instead provide service and support to other companies who wanted to. CBS invested considerable capital in the development of their ExtraVision service, which also included closed captioning and channel information along with more traditional Telidon information. Affiliate stations could also insert their own content into

6380-530: The Weitbrecht Modem. The Weitbrecht Modem inspired other engineers to develop other modems to work with 8-bit ASCII terminals at a faster rate. Such modems or couplers were developed around 1966 by John van Geen at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International ), that mimicked handset operations. An early commercial model was built by Livermore Data Systems in 1968. One would dial

6496-546: 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 ("Character and Pattern Telephone Access Information Network"), created by NTT 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,

6612-483: The additional benefit of providing information from different firms and allowing interactive communication between the firms. One of the earliest corporations to participate in videotex in the United States was American Express. Its service, branded "American Express ADVANCE" included card account info, travel booking, stock prices from Shearson Lehman, and even online shopping, through its Merchandise Services division. Australia's national public Videotex service, Viatel,

6728-472: The back of the unit there was a RS-232 and Centronics 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. In Spain the system was provided by the Telefónica company and called Ibertex, which was adopted from the French Minitel system, but using

6844-417: The car models available. This particular project was the single largest sale of Telidon in North America and allowed users to examine car models without speaking with a car salesperson. AT&T started a standardization effort with Bell and the DoC. AT&T contributed two major additions to the system; the ability to define your own character sets , and the ability to wrap up multiple graphics commands into

6960-583: The computer system (which would have telephone company datasets) on one's phone, and when the connection was established, place the handset into the acoustic modem. Since the handsets were all supplied by the telephone company, most had the same shape, simplifying the physical interface. A microphone and a speaker inside the modem box would pick up and transmit the signaling tones, and circuitry would convert those audio frequency-shift keying encoded binary signals for an RS232 output socket. With luck one could get 300 baud (~bits/second) transmission rates, but 150 baud

7076-403: 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 a landline . Unlike

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7192-545: The early test systems had ended their runs by 1982, while the commercial systems persevered for a few years longer; NBC 's system ended in January 1985, and then ExtraVision, Viewtron and Gateway in March 1986. In spite of these services finding some level of consumer demand, none were able to find a pricing structure that paid for their operation while still being interesting to their consumer base. Telidon systems continued to be used as

7308-400: The entire burden of creating the content on the service providers and their partners, an expensive and time-consuming process. Since much of the content in question was already available on different media controlled by the same companies, teletext services also had the problem of competing with incumbent mediums that were less expensive and better developed. Telidon was also expensive. When it

7424-523: The existing DATAPAC dial-up points such as the Bell 212 , created severe limitations, as it made use of the nationwide X.25 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 2 resolution in 8-byte mode. There

7540-432: The failure of Telidon as a promising technology or efforts made, Telidon's seemingly slow international acceptance and North America's sluggishness in pushing it to higher level of functionality was a topic of considerable discussion and disappointment in Canada, part of a similar and wider conversation on the entire concept of videotex that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many of the Telidon criticisms focused on

7656-508: 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 (launched in 1985). Nevertheless, NAPLPS-based services were developed by several other joint partnerships between 1983 and 1987. These included: A joint venture of AT&T-CBS completed

7772-495: The fray with a Ceefax-clone known as ORACLE . In 1974, all the services agreed on 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 finalized 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

7888-492: The general electrical compatibility. It was not until a landmark U.S. court ruling regarding the Hush-A-Phone in 1956 that the use of a phone attachment (by a third party vendor) was allowed for the first time; though AT&T 's right to regulate any device connected to the telephone system was upheld by the courts, they were instructed to cease interference towards Hush-A-Phone users. A second court decision in 1968 regarding

8004-468: The handset's microphone, and sound from the speaker in the telephone handset's earpiece would be picked up by a microphone in the cup attached to that. In this way signals could be passed in both directions. Despite the use of seals, acoustic couplers were sensitive to external noise and depended on the then-widespread standardization of the size and shape of handsets. Once direct electrical connections to telephone networks were made legal, they rapidly became

8120-481: 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 , a "second generation" videotex/teletext service, and committed to

8236-635: 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. Videotex technology was also adopted for use internally within organizations. Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) offered a videotex product (VTX) on the VAX system. Goldman Sachs, for one, adopted and developed an internal fixed income information distribution and bond sales system based on DEC VTX. Internal systems were overtaken by external vendors, notably Bloomberg, which offered

8352-492: The local cable television companies. The images were rendered locally, and then sent out as normal television signals to the customers. This avoided the need to send entire channels of video over satellite to the affiliate stations, instead, a small amount of data was sent and allowed the video to be recreated, for significantly less cost. Test deployments demonstrated the problems that most other teletext systems also discovered: without an enormous amount of content, viewer interest

8468-574: The market, AT&T Corporation 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

8584-483: The mass market. By the mid-1980s, home computers with graphics capabilities similar to Telidon had already come and gone, driving prices to points far below even the simplest Telidon terminal. A generation of machines like the Macintosh , Amiga , and Atari ST were entering the market with capabilities Telidon systems could not match. At the same time, information services like CompuServe and The Source were offering

8700-403: 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

8816-735: The network. The same set-up was operative in nearly all countries, where the telephone companies were nationally owned. In many households, telephones were hard-wired to wall terminals before connectors like RJ11 and BS 6312 became standardized. The situation was similar in other countries. In Australia, until 1975 the PMG , a Government monopoly , owned all telephone wiring and equipment in user premises and prohibited attachment of third party devices, and while most handsets were connected by 600 series connectors , these were rare in Australia so imported equipment could not be directly connected in any case, despite

8932-432: The new alphanumeric PDI. The CRC had patented several of the technologies by the end of 1977; a touch-sensitive input mechanism, the basic graphics system, and the interactive graphics programming language. By the mid-1970s several European countries were in the process of introducing videotex and teletext services. There was considerable interest within the industry, and in the media, suggesting that online services would be

9048-1224: The northern United States . A significant showcase for the Telidon system was set up for the Third General Assembly of the Inuit Circumpolar Council , hosted in Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island in July 1983. A database of information about the conference and its services was hosted by Teleglobe Canada in Toronto on their Novatex system, with the information translated into English, French, Danish, Inuktitut, Greenlandic, Labradorian, Inupiag, Yupik and Western Arctic. Sixteen Telidon terminals, supplied by Microtel, were located at various sites in Frobisher Bay, with additional terminals in Vancouver , Washington, D.C. , Copenhagen , Anchorage , Bethel , Utqiagvik , Nuuk , as well as other northern communities. Communications were provided by Bell Canada , Teleglobe , Greenland Telecommunications and

9164-612: The only system available. It was also used for Microsoft 's WebTV for Windows and Intel 's Intercast . Both used custom tuners, in the form of plug-in cards for PCs, that captured the information encoded into the VBI or even an entire TV channel. For his work on Telidon, Herb Bown received the Order of Canada and the gold medal for engineering excellence from the Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario . The Touche Ross New Perspectives Award

9280-471: 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": 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

9396-521: The pages typically took two or three times longer to load, compared to the European systems. NHK 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). Work to establish an international standard for videotex began in 1978 in CCITT . But

9512-535: The point where the data was no longer overwhelming. After a promising start, Prodigy management invoked a series of blunders that seriously upset their customer base, and the arrival of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s killed it off. NABTS, the communications protocol for embedding data in the TV signal, also saw continued use after the Telidon project ended. It was widely used for closed captioning support, although not

9628-565: The preferred method of attaching modems, and the use of acoustic couplers dwindled. Acoustic couplers were still used until at least the late 1990s by people travelling in areas of the world where electrical connection to the telephone network was illegal or impractical. Many models of Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) still have a built-in acoustic coupler, which allow more universal use with pay phones and for emergency calls by deaf people. An acoustic coupler (a Novation CAT 300 baud model)

9744-452: 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

9860-403: The reality is really quite disappointing." Most teletext systems, Telidon included, were created in the context of the broadcast model, where the content would be provided by large vendors and then pushed one-way to the user in a fashion similar to television or newspapers. Interactivity was generally limited to menu selections or providing information on forms (like online banking ). This placed

9976-438: The role of government in development of the systems, pushing a technology that no one really wanted. After most of the commercial efforts had ended, NAPLPS received a fresh breath of life as the basis of the Prodigy online service. In the time between efforts like Viewtron and the launch of Prodigy in 1988, personal computers with the ability to view NAPLPS graphics with ease had become common, and modem speeds had increased to

10092-412: The same infrastructure but using their own access-phone numbers and dedicated access-points. As these services weren't public you had to log into 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

10208-523: The same period, the Task Force on Service to the Public was given the job of using Telidon as a way to provide public access to government information and services. By late 1979 Norpak had developed a version of the Telidon decoder that was housed in a box about the size of a modern digital cable set top box . A menu selection keyset, about the size and shape of a contemporary calculator , connected to it using

10324-449: The standard complete, the U.S. teletext plans started moving forward. NAPLPS' ability to draw complex graphics was particularly interesting to U.S. information vendors such as Compuserve, as it allowed them to draw network or advertiser logos. By this point the technical development of Telidon was complete, and that portion of the Canadian government's involvement wound down in the summer of 1983. Further efforts were aimed at helping develop

10440-458: The streams, although the high cost of the systems needed to do this made it relatively rare. AT&T also partnered with Knight-Ridder Newspapers to form Viewdata, a holding company that operated the " Viewtron " service. Test marketed in Florida in 1980, the service expanded to the entire southern Florida area by 1983, and then expanded to much of the eastern seaboard. Viewdata started primarily as

10556-479: The system failed to capture a large market and was ultimately withdrawn due to lack of commercial interest. The rise of the internet and other global online services in the early to mid-1990s played a major factor in the death of Irish Minitel. The service eventually ended by the end of the 1990s .. Acoustic coupler In telecommunications , an acoustic coupler is an interface device for coupling electrical signals by acoustical means—usually into and out of

10672-464: The system for North America. In the early 1980s, videotex became the base technology for the London Stock Exchange's pricing service called TOPIC. Later versions of TOPIC, notably TOPIC2 and TOPIC3, were developed by Thanos Vassilakis and introduced trading and historic price feeds. Development of a French teletext-like system began in 1973. A very simple 2-way videotex system called Tictac

10788-433: The system to the particular hardware they were using was not appropriate, and started modifying the PDI system to be based on alphanumeric codes instead of binary numbers. A major advantage to this approach is that the data can be sent over common communications channels instead of relying on an 8-bit clean link to the host computer. In 1975 the CRC contracted Norpak to develop an interactive colour display terminal based on

10904-404: The telephone and will have just as great a social impact." They were not alone in predicting great things for the technology: It is no exaggeration to say that the telecommunications marketplace in Canada was gripped by Telidon fever from late 1979 to late 1982. Hope and belief displaced analysis and reason: hope and belief in technology – science-based technology – as an agent of change,

11020-471: The test-report. Later, some additional services for the branch were added such as a service where the readings of the odometer 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 direct access to most services of the French minitel system. A version of

11136-497: 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 an IEEE interface card could be fitted. On

11252-498: 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 / Minc 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 region, where

11368-401: The user perspective the main difference between these systems was that Viditel used standard dial-in phone numbers where Videotex used premium-rate telephone numbers . 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

11484-553: The user to pay for the terminal (today referred to as a set-top box ), 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

11600-504: 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 online shopping and remote working that has proven to be prophetic. Before the IBM PC , Microsoft MS-DOS and the Internet or World Wide Web, he invented and manufactured and sold

11716-484: The world's 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. One of the earliest experiments with marketing videotex to consumers in the U.S. was by Radio Shack , which sold

11832-576: Was a transparent connection where the host handled the protocol. As said the Videotex Nederland services offered access via several primary rate numbers 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 ) per minute. Besides these public available services, generally without authentication, there were also several private services using

11948-424: 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. Services included: NAPLPS-based systems (Teleguide) were also used for an interactive Mall directory system in various locations, including

12064-552: 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 , 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 gave Antiope slightly more flexibility in

12180-421: Was awarded to Herb Bown and Doug O'Brien. Bown later formed IDON Corp to develop interactive teaching materials. Videotex In a strict definition, videotex is any system that provides interactive content and displays it on a video monitor such as a television, typically using modems to send data in both directions. A close relative is teletext , which sends data in one direction only, typically encoded in

12296-635: Was carried out in Elie , rotating the terminals though many households in the area. Ida was followed by several Canadian companies starting similar projects. In early 1980, TVOntario , the educational television channel run by the Ontario government, set up 45 terminals in the Toronto area. In April 1981, New Brunswick Telephone set up a system practically identical to Project Ida with a full suite of services, with somewhere between 20 and 100 terminals. The same month, Alberta Government Telephones started "Project VIDON",

12412-600: Was considered a success, so much so that AT&T publicly announced plans to introduce a commercial system in 1984. General Motors' EPIC Project used special user access kiosks with video-disk based motion video and sound integrated with Teldion data arriving from the data center in Flint, Michigan. Kiosks were distributed to hundreds of shopping malls and Buick dealers in various states. Users were able to leave their addresses for future contact, request car brochures or explore all technical and visual data with motion and sound to see all

12528-447: Was introduced the DoC expected terminals to be available for $ 200 to $ 300 by 1982, but this did not come to be. The largest suppliers of terminals were Electrohome , Norpak and Microtel, whose terminals ranged between $ 1,800 and $ 2,500. During the development period the hardware manufacturers felt that demand would drive down prices to less than $ 600, however, results from trials indicated that even this would be considered too expensive for

12644-615: Was launched by Telecom Australia on 28 February 1985. It was based on the British Prestel 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. According to an article in a 1986 edition of the "Viatel Directory And Magazine", the Viatel system had a rapid take up in its first year. A private service known as TAARIS (Travel Agents Association Reservation and Information Service)

12760-693: 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. In the Netherlands , the then state-owned phone company PTT (now KPN ) operated two platforms: Viditel (launched in 1980 ) and Videotex Nederland. From

12876-433: Was limited. CCITT T.101 ISO-IR registered character sets for Videotex use include variants of T.51 , semigraphic mosaic sets, specialised C0 control codes , and four sets of specialised C1 control codes . 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

12992-519: Was more typical. That speed was sufficient for typewriter-based terminals, as the IBM 2741 , running at 134.5 baud, or a teleprinter , running at 110 baud. The practical upper limit for acoustic-coupled modems was 1200 baud, first made available in 1973 by Vadic and 1977 by AT&T. 1200 baud endpoints became widespread in 1985 with the advent of the Hayes Smartmodem 1200A, though it used an RJ11 jack and

13108-406: Was not an acoustic coupler. Such devices facilitated the creation of dial-up bulletin board systems , a forerunner of modern internet chat rooms , message boards , and e-mail . Usually, a telephone handset was placed into a cradle that had been engineered to fit closely (by the use of rubber seals) around its microphone and earpiece. A modem would modulate a loudspeaker in the cup attached to

13224-408: Was not needed by these early fax machines. Robert Weitbrecht created a workaround for the Bell restrictions in 1963. He developed a coupling device that converted sound from the ear piece of the telephone handset to electrical signals, and converted the electrical pulses coming from the teletypewriter to sound that goes into the mouth piece of the telephone handset. His acoustic coupler is known as

13340-519: Was quite expensive). The standard also introduced a new term that covered all such services, teletext . Ceefax first started operation in 1974 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

13456-421: 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

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