A game of What-If - American Minitel - 'What if VideoTel actually succeeded'

Discussions
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This isn’t strictly true, it’s more that baking those protocols into the terminal service just isn’t the Internet/Unix Way (as you allude above). You could absolutely use rz/sz to transfer files over telnet or ssh (and I have done it). Furthermore, the GNU screen terminal multiplexer will automatically receive zmodem transfers if configured to do so.

But yes, there is something to the fact that always-on Unix systems, by at least the mid 1980s, simply expected it to be practical to spin up a new connection if needed.

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I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of XModem. ZModem was an entirely different protocol, but he named it such because he had previously made an extended version of XModem known as YModem, so the next was was going to be ZModem come hell or high water!

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I recall this being shown on CBC’s The National one night. My 13-yo self was glued to the 14" TV screen. The machines in question were Norpac set-top-boxes, with membrane control panels connected with fat ribbon cables.

The reference to the C64 seems to be to a later decoder, I think the project was mostly running down by this point. I don’t believe they gave out C64s, although I suppose that was almost certainly cheaper than the Norpac box.

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Related, I think:

Experimental use of Telidon began in 1977 and the first bona fide field trials began in 1979. Commercial market trials began in early 1981 with Project Ida, conducted by the Manitoba Telephone System. This evolved into a partnership between Manitoba Telephone and Infomart, Canada’s main videotex software and service provider, to create Project Grassroots in rural Manitoba in 1982. Grassroots, based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was North America’s first alphamosaic commercial viewdata service with regular subscribers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Northern Ontario. Its specialty was farm-related information and services and it was extended into the Northern United States by 1985.

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And all the videotex decoders were dog slow. Must be the intel cpu.
The one thing was strange was a split speed terminal.
1200/2400? baud recive and a 300 baud transmit on the phone lines.

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Slightly OT, but maybe of interest…

I know little of Videotex, Minitel, etc. outside the UK, but here we had something called Prestel.

Unlike the French - whos Minitel was leveraged into French homes with the promise of replacing their paper phone book (which I understand it succeeded very well at) Prestel was aimed mostly at business users, although home users soon cottoned on.

It was run by British telecom. You dialled a special phone number (3 digits) and were charged at a local rate (No such thing as a free local call in the UK), so BT got a per minute free from the call. Not only that, but some pages were pay to view. Usually 1p - added to your phone bill. Most users were, I think travel agents.

As for the decoder - it wasn’t slow it was blindingly fast as it was implemented in hardware in the form of a TV character generator requiring just 1KB of RAM. You poked bytes into the RAM and just like other computers they displayed on the screen at a fixed location.

There was not normally scrolling but the screen could be scrolled. This is the classic Mode 7 on a BBC Micro - it was fitted with the decoder/font chip as standard. (Mullard SAA5050)

You could display colours, double height and graphics (2x3 pixels in a single character cell). There were many creative ways to generate images.

The one UK service aimed at home users was something called Micronet 800. So-called as their landing page was page 800. This features games (In particular a MUD called Shades) and email. (To your Prestel user number which was essentially your phone number!)

The only other home service other than Micronet that I know of was which ran over Prestel was the Bank of Scotland who had their own terminal hardware with built-in modem - it’s function was primarily to access online banking (in the 1980s!).

The speed was 1200/75. 1200 to you, 75 back to the servers. I’m not 100% sure why, but at the time, modem technology was still evolving and this allowed full duplex communications using the FSK technologies of the time.

It’s one of those things that “could have been” in the UK, but it wasn’t cheap. My phone bills were not good viewing… Fun though.

-Gordon

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I was taking about a NAPLPS decoder here. 1200/75 sounds right in canada too.

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According to conversations I’ve had with Leif Bloomquist (who is from Manitoba, and whose website I’d linked to) MTS developed the C64 Videotex decoder to provide lower cost Videotex/Telidon terminals to rural clients. Apart from its extreme file size limits, it’s quite a capable NAPLPS terminal. The Norpac kit was expensive, though not as expensive as the Telidon/NAPLPS composer workstation, which was in the six figures.

Yes, very much so. Videotex/Telidon are near synonyms. They use the same bizarrely clever NAPLPS encoding that encodes pixel coordinates as binary fractions. It also tends to hard-code 4:3 screen aspect ratio in the pixel coordinates. It almost makes Teletext character codes seem sensible.

I played around with generating NAPLPS earlier this year: The glorious futility of generating NAPLPS in 2023 – We Saw a Chicken … after seeing the installation Remember Tomorrow: A Telidon Story | InterAccess in Toronto. While my glorious futility link includes some NAPLPS reference, the real star archivist is John Durno, a librarian at UVic who has been working with the technology for years after being lucky enough to find a Norpac terminal in a university store room. He provided the technical side of InterAccess’s exhibit, running an MS-DOS NAPLPS terminal inside DOSBox on a Raspberry Pi and using a customized USB numeric keypad as the Telidon controller. It was great to see a “lost” technology be brought back to life, and hear interviews with artists who saw NAPLPS as a medium with great potential.

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The fact that your Prestel/Micronet ID was your phone number had an unfortunate side effect for me. I’d posted on a BBS popular with, um, people who like to explore other people’s computers and had given out my Micronet ID for anyone who wanted to share info. That was fine until that message was printed in The Hacker’s Handbook as an example of bulletin board use. ‘Hugo Cornwall’, the author, had meticulously redacted the names of all authors of messages but had overlooked that number. Immediately after the publication of the book, I started getting weird calls at all hours of the night (rarely during the day) from people asking if I had any ‘interesting numbers’ to dial. That wasn’t fun.

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Wow guys you’ve all been giving me a heck of a lot to chew through.

and having your phone number as the login identifier is… i mean for the system it makes sense as the login credential but not for the display name.

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