The British Post Office, now British Telecom, experimented with videotex
in the early 1970s. In 1979, it launched its videotex service, also called
viewdata. The technology was to have mixed fortunes.
It used expensively
adapted television sets and telephone lines to connect to remote databases
and was able to allow users access to thousands of pages of
information. But those users proved to be elusive.
The technology was a forerunner of on-line services today. Instead of a
computer, an television set hooked to a dedicated terminal was used to
receive information from a remote database via a telephone line. The
service offered thousands of pages ranging from consumer information to
financial data but with limited graphics. The service was too expensive to
attract consumers in any significant volume. The cost of the adapted
'televisions' was nearly three times a normal set, certain pages were
charged and telephone bills were additional.
The system proved to be prohibitively expensive
for the consumer market. British Telecom was to focus on the business
sector by the late 1980s, but the service was still struggling to make any
commercial impact. Ahead of its time, without the benefit
of cheap personal computing, the technology was to be an expensive
Sam Fedida, Computer Applications Manager British
Post Office Research Laboratories, was the acknowledged inventor. He was a
research engineer who had been at the fore of a host of cutting edge
projects. The first public demonstration was in late 1974 on a
Hewlett-Packard minicomputer. Its commercial launch was effectively early
1979. It was a sad irony that Clive Fedida, son of the inventor and
British Telecom executive, was to be instrumental in closing the service
in the spring of 1994.
British Telecom all but dropped the general
consumer, concentrating on a supposedly more lucrative market in the
business subscriber. By some it was considered to be ahead of its time, a
visionary product of a design engineer. Others considered the experiment
an expensive research toy with little commercial value.
The inventor of Prestel is currently (Fall 1995)
in retirement in Felixstowe, East Anglia, on the east coast of England.
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