🧕🏻 👰🏿 🆙 Internet History: Era of Fragmentation; part 2: sowing wasteland 📼 👩‍👩‍👦 💹

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On May 9, 1961, Newton Minov, the newly appointed chairman of the board of directors of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), delivered his first speech in his term. He spoke to the national association of broadcasting companies, a commercial industrial group founded in the 1920s to advance the interests of commercial radio. At the time of Minov, the big three dominated this organization - ABC, CBS and NBC. Minov knew that the television people were afraid of the changes that the new administration might bring after the activist rhetoric of John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, New Frontiers. And he really, after a couple of laudatory words, began to criticize the content created by his audience. “When the television is done well, Minov said,

– , , – . , . , , . , , , , – . , .* , .

[ * In those days, television was not around the clock / approx. perev. ]

Minov called instead of a cavalcade of “chaos, violence, sadism, murder” and endless “screaming, begging and annoying” advertising inserts to develop a program of programs “expanding the horizons of the viewer, offering him full-fledged entertainment, useful stimulation, and reminding him of the citizen's responsibility to society “.

And Minov began to act according to this speech, but he did not prohibit the existing programs. Instead, he began supporting initiatives that would help less commercially voted voices reach a television audience. For example, the law on multichannel receivers of 1962 required TV manufacturers to include the possibility of receiving UHF in their products, which made it possible to add dozens of television channels to broadcasting.

However, at that time another way of spreading television, the potential capacity of which exceeded even the UHF, was already spinning, mile after mile, on American soil.

Public tv

Cable television began with television with a local antenna (community antenna television, CATV), a way to bring broadcast television to places where the largest network stations did not reach — often these were cities in mountainous areas. In the 1940s, entrepreneurs began installing their own antennas on high ground, catching broadcast signals, amplifying them and re-transmitting it to shielded cable to customers for money.

Soon, cable operators found other ways to bring more channels to the audience - for example, importing stations from cities with a wide selection of programs, to cities with a small selection (for example, from Los Angeles to San Diego). Cable providers began to build their own microwave networks, allowing them to engage in such arbitration of entertainment, expanding the scope of influence beyond the local markets only. By 1971, some 19 million American viewers were using cable television (out of a 200 million population).

However, the cable potentially had much more possibilities than simply expanding the “wasteland” transmitted by broadcast over the air to clients tied to it. Since the signals in the cable were isolated from the outside world, they were not subject to FCC restrictions on the use of the spectrum - from the practical point of view of those times, their bandwidth was unlimited. In the 1960s, some cable systems began to use this capacity, offering programs dedicated to local events, even created by local schoolchildren or students. The local antenna, bringing television to local customers, made it available to the community, leading to local producers' TV shows.

At the forefront of cable television's potential advertising was Ralph Lee Smith, who at first glance could not be classified as a supporter of high technology. He was a bohemian writer and folk musician in the Manhattan quarter of Greenwich Village , and today his site is mainly dedicated to his work with the Dulcimer . However, his first book, Health Profiteers, published in 1960, revealed him as a progressive person who looked like Minov — he stood for tough government actions aimed at following public interests. In 1970, he published an article entitled “Connected Nation,” which two years later grew into a book.

In this book, Smith sketched a future “electronic highway” based on a report from the Electronic Industry Association (EIA), which included major computer manufacturers. According to the plans of the EIA and Smith, this system of cable highways, a national network consisting of coaxial cable, will be able to combine all the televisions in all houses and offices of the country. The nodes of this vast network will be computers, and users at home terminals will be able to send signals “upstream” to these computers to control the content coming to their TVs - everything from personal messages to store catalogs, from books to remote access to libraries .

Connected Cities

In the early 1970s, MITER Corporation led a research project, trying to realize this idea. MITER was a nonprofit subsidiary of MIT's Lincoln Labs, created to manage the development of the SAGE air defense system. Over the previous decade, the system recruited employees in Washington, DC, and settled on a campus in Macklin, Virginia. They came up with the idea of a “connected nation” thanks to another futuristic concept of the 1960s, “computer-aided instruction” (CAI). CAI seemed feasible thanks to the advent of time-sharing systems that allowed students to work on their own terminals and connect dozens and hundreds of similar devices to a single central computer. Many 1960s scholars believed (or hoped) that the CAI would transform the education system, allow for personalized curricula for each student, and be able to deliver high-level education to poor areas of cities or the countryside. The problem of poor areas was especially acute then,when almost every summer in American citiesthere were riots - be it Watts, Detroit or Newark.

Among the many researchers who experimented with CAI were Charles Victor Bunderson, a psychology professor who created the CAI lab at the University of Texas at Austin. As part of a grant from NSF, Bunderson worked on a computer-based curriculum in corrective mathematics and English for college students. However, the project ended up being too complicated for him, so he enlisted the help of David Merrill, a professor of education at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah. Meryl defended his doctorate at the University of Illinois under the leadership of Larry Stolurov, creator of the SOCRATES computer-based training system. There, on the university campus, he met another early CAI project, the PLATO system.

Bunderson and Merrill together filed an application with NSF and MITER for a larger grant that would cover MITRE, BYU, and Texas. It was assumed that MITRE will manage this project and apply the best practices in the field of creating systems to hardware and computer software with time sharing. The Bunderson Laboratory from Austin will be responsible for the overall educational strategy (based on student management - guidance on the speed of material that the student regulates) and educational software. BYU was supposed to implement the educational program itself. NSF bought the concept and allocated a generous grant of $ 5 million to launch a project called TICCET - an educational television controlled by a time-sharing computer.

The MITRE scheme consisted of two Data General Nova minicomputers with support for Sony's 128 color TVs as terminals. The student's kit also included headphones and a keyboard, but a push-button telephone with tone dialing was also supported as an input device. The use of low-cost minicomputers for processing information as a terminal, which were already quite common in homes, made it possible to reduce the total cost of the system and facilitate its implementation in schools. Influenced by MITRE, the CAI project is inspired by the spirit of the “connected nation” idea. TICCET evolved into TICCIT after replacing the “Educational” with “Information”. MITER imagined a system capable of delivering not only education, but also various social and information services to poor areas.They hired Ralph Lee Smith as a consultant and planned a microwave connection between TICCIT and the local cable television system in Reston, Virginia, whose construction was in the immediate future. The demonstration system began operating in the Reston Transmission Company cable network in July 1971.

MITRE’s grandiose plans included expanding this concept to the Washington cable system, nine sectors of which were distributed across the District of Columbia, and launching it for the US bicentennial in 1976. However, in the end, the system in Reston did not live up to expectations. After all the stories about on-demand education and the delivery of social services to the masses, the TICCIT system in Reston provided only the opportunity, by calling the MITER Data General computers, to display pre-prepared screens with information on the TV (for example, bus schedules or the results of local sports matches). It was just an embellished version of a telephone system that told you the exact time and weather. By 1973, the Reston system stopped working, and the Washington cable system did not work. One of the main obstacles to expansion was the cost of local memory,required for continuous updating of information on the screen in accordance with the data coming from the central computer. MITER transferred TICCIT technology to Hazeltine Corporation for commercial development in 1976, where she lived another ten years as a training complex.

Videotex

The first major American experiment with television working in both directions can hardly be called a failure. However, during the same period, the idea that television would be the ideal delivery mechanism for new computerized information services was more deeply rooted in Europe. This second wave of two-way television, which was mostly fired by telecommunications giants, basically abandoned the newfangled cable technology in favor of well-known telephone lines to communicate with the TV and computer. Although television cables had a huge advantage in bandwidth, the trump card of the phone was mass - a small number of people had cable TV, especially outside the United States.

It all started with Sam Fedida, an engineer from Egypt who got a job at British Post Office (BPO) in 1970. At that time, the post office also had a monopoly on telecommunications, and Fedidu was thrown into a project to develop a “viewphone” system - a video telephony similar to the Picturephone project recently launched by AT&T in Pittsburgh and Chicago. However, the Picturephone concept failed miserably, showing itself to be extremely inconvenient in technical terms - a constant video stream consumed huge amounts of bandwidth, too large for the era before the advent of fiber optic networks. To transmit a picture with a resolution of only 250 lines (half the standard television picture of that time), AT&T had to charge $ 150 per 30 minutes of video calls per month, and 25 cents for each additional minute.

Therefore, Fedida came up with a more flexible and less expensive alternative - not a “watch phone”, but a “watchdog”, Viewdata. Wikipedia claims that Fedida was inspired by the 1968 article by Taylor and Liklider, “ Computer as a Communication Device ”. The connection is interesting, but I did not find any historical evidence for it.

Mail could connect users with computers that act as switches and offer them information services by sending screens with data to a home TV, and receiving feedback using a client’s telephone with tone dialing. Static text screens and simple pictures that needed to be updated at most once every few seconds would require much less bandwidth than video. And also the system would use home equipment already available to most people instead of special screens like Picturephone.

Fedida and his successor as project leader, Alex Reid, convinced BPO that the Viewdata project would attract new customers and increase the profit of the existing fixed-cost telecommunications structure, especially during light-duty evening hours. Thus, the project moved away from philanthropic ideas about how interactive television can serve the benefit of society, towards commercial calculations of how online services can increase profits.

After several years of development in 1979, BPO opened the Viewdata system for users in selected cities under the Prestel brand - a wallet word from the words “press” (newspaper) and “telephone”. The GEC 4000 minicomputers in local telephone offices responded to user requests transmitted over the telephone line, providing them with any of more than 100,000 different “pages” - screens with information stored in the database. Data was provided by government organizations, newspapers, magazines, and other businesses, and covered topics from news and weather to bookkeeping and yoga. Each local database was regularly updated from a central computer in London.

Simple Prestel Screen Example

The terminals displayed pages of 24 lines and 40 columns of characters in color, and simple graphics were composed of characters containing simple geometric shapes. The screens were organized in a tree structure in which users could navigate, however, the user could request a specific page directly by entering its unique digital code. The user could not only receive, but also send information - for example, reserve a place on the plane. In the mid-1980s, the Prestel Mailbox service was launched, allowing users to send messages to each other.

Prestel angular graphics consisting of rectangles partially or fully filled with color

Despite the initial intentions of the engineers, at launch Prestel required a special TV with a built-in modem and other electronic equipment - probably due to the resistance of the TV manufacturers, who demanded from BPO their share for the invasion of their territory. It is easy to guess that the need to buy a new and rather expensive TV (from £ 650) to subscribe to the service became a serious obstacle to the recruitment of subscribers, and this strategy was soon abandoned in favor of cheaper systems. However, the cost of using the system repelled most of the potential users from it: £ 5 per quarter, plus the cost of phone calls, plus per-minute payment during business hours, plus an additional per-minute payment for premium services. By the mid-1980s, the system had only 60,000 subscribers,and the most popular were tourism and financial services, and not at all entertaining content. She survived until the mid-90s, but never went beyond 100,000 subscribers.

But despite all the difficulties, Prestel had many competitors and imitators. Other companies launched similar services based on on-screen text and simple graphics, for which information was delivered via telephone lines. This category of services was called videotex. Among the systems that provided it were: Canadian Telidon, West German Bildschirmtext, Australian Viatel. Like the BPO system, almost all of them were run under the control of government agencies. But, despite the absence of such structures in the United States, videotex penetrated where it eventually generated a major competitor in the information services market.

Videotex in a new way

The history of the Prodigy service begins in Canada. The Communications Research Center (CRC), a government lab in Ottawa, in the 1970s worked on encoding simple graphics into a text stream independent of Viewdata. They developed a system that allowed designers to add arbitrary coloring polygons to screens using special symbolic codes indicating location, direction, color, etc. Other special characters switched the system between graphic and text mode. This allowed us to implement richer and more intuitive graphics than Prestel, which built images from small simple forms that did not go beyond the boundaries of the symbol grid.

AT&T, impressed by the flexibility of the Canadian system, and having received permission from the FCC in Computer II in 1980 to allow limited competition in the digital services market, decided to try to bring two-way television, videotex, to the US market. The joint CRC and AT&T standard was called NAPLPS (North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax).

AT&T developed the Scepter terminal with a modem and NAPLPS decoding equipment, and in the early 1980s launched experiments with videotex in several regions of the country, each of which the company had its own partner: in Florida - Viewtron with the newspaper conglomerate Knight-Ridder; in California, Gateway with another newspaper conglomerate, Times-Mirror; in New Jersey - VentureOne with CBS. Viewtron and Gateway projects burnt and closed in 1986. However, VentureOne, although CBS and AT&T closed it in 1983, less than a year after the start, laid the foundation for more long-term achievements.

The full power of NAPLPS graphics can be judged by this weather map from the Viewtron project.

Due to a new court ruling based on the separation of Ma BellAT&T (which was taken away from all local operators and allowed to do only long-distance communications) was again banned from entering the computer services market. Then in 1984, CBS restarted its videotex project with two new partners, IBM and Sears. They named Trintex as a sign that three companies were involved in the project. IBM, a computer maker in first place in the world by a margin from the rest, has given obvious weight to the partnership. Sears brought online its expertise in the field of retail sales, and CBS - experience in working with the media and content. Sears’s cataloging infrastructure could give her a chance in the impending battle for the online market, but instead she abandoned the catalog in 1993 and sold her share in the Prodigy project in 1996. If Viewdata set videotex technology on a commercialization path,then Trintex completed this conversion.

Trintex's videotex architect hired David Walks, a systems engineer who has been working with computers since college at Cornell University in the late 1950s. Wox believed that the system in general should be untied from videotex, more precisely, that Trintex should abandon the bundle of videotex and a home TV. The NAPLPS protocol did a good job of efficiently transmitting high-resolution graphics over slow communication channels - the Scepter terminal modem supported up to 1200 bps, which was pretty good for those times. Wox even improved this system by introducing partial content updates so that part of the picture could be updated without sending the entire screen every time. However, the assumption that a special set-top box connected to the TV was the easiest way to deliver online services is outdated,given that millions of Americans already had machines capable of decoding and displaying content from NAPLPS - home computers. Wox argued that Trintex should go the same way as GEnie with CompuServe and use microcomputer programs as a client terminal, abandoning the special console. It is likely that IBM, as the manufacturer of the IBM PC, supported this idea.

By the time the system was launched in 1987, one of the three partners, CBS, had already left the project due to financial difficulties. And the name Trintex still didn’t sound very good, so the company was renamed to Prodigy. Local calls to regional computers connected users to a data network based on the IBM System Network Architecture (SNA), which redirected them to the Prodigy data center, located near the IBM headquarters in White Plains, New York. The cunning caching system left frequently used data in regional computers so that it did not need to be requested from New York every time - it was the prototype of today's content delivery networks (CDNs). You can read more about Prodigy architecture in John Markoff's books, “Betting on a Different Videotex Idea,” The New York Times, July 12, 1989 and Benj Edwards,“Where Online Services Go When They Die,” July 12, 2014.

Prodigy was notable for its ease of use, beautiful graphics, monthly rates without hourly surcharges, and therefore it quickly caught up with its main rivals, CompuServe and Genie (and soon America Online). However, the fixed-payment business model depended heavily on collecting fees from advertisers and online stores. Prodigy executives seem to have overlooked the fact that the most popular method of using online services was to communicate between people, which consumed hours of computer and network time, but did not give any profit. Prodigy, having first obeyed the technological structure of its predecessors, in the early 90s switched to their hourly pay model.

Weather map in the Prodigy system

Prodigy at the same time shows the point of highest development and decline of videotex technology in the USA. It developed using televisions, but then refused to deliver content through special set-top boxes, friendly to users. Instead, she used the same microcomputer approach as her successful contemporaries. When TICCIT and Viewdata were just thinking, the computer was an expensive toy that ordinary people could hardly afford. Almost all representatives of the digital services industry assumed that data would need to be delivered from some central computers with time sharing to inexpensive and “dumb” terminals, and home television sets were an obvious device for displaying information. But by the mid-1980s, microcomputers had penetrated this market in the United States so much,that a fundamentally new world began to emerge. One could already imagine - or rather, it is difficult to deny - that almost everyone will soon have their own computer, which will become their personal “trip to the information superhighway”.

Prodigy, the failed member of the videotex family, was the latest example of the use of this technology in the United States. By the time of its launch, all other major experiments in this area have already been closed. However, there was another videotex-based system that I have not mentioned yet, and it was the most popular of all - the French Minitel. Its history, and its particular philosophy of startup and work, requires its own chapter in this anthology for detailed explanations. And as if turning the “box” into a useful device for self-improvement and communication was not an ambitious goal, Minitel tried to change the direction of the development of the whole country, from a slow decline to technological superiority.

What else to read:

Brian Dear, The Friendly Orange Glow (2017)
Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare (2005)
MITER Corporation, MITER: The First Twenty Years (1979)

Internet History: Era of Fragmentation; part 2: sowing wasteland

Public tv

Connected Cities

Videotex

Videotex in a new way

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