EdS
April 26, 2020, 6:47am
1
Another instalment from Creatures of Thought:
On May 9, 1961, Newton Minow, newly-appointed chairman of the FCC, gave the first speech of his tenure. He spoke before the National Association of Broadcasters, a trade industry group founded in t…
(Some previous posts noted in the thread
An ARPANET history (blogged)
)
NoLand
April 26, 2020, 5:55pm
2
Interesting to learn that early Prestel was named Viewdata. If I recall this right, the international QWERTY Minitel terminals went by the name Viewdata terminals. Is there a direct connection? (At least, Minitel also uses Prestel graphics, but is there more to this?)
EdS
April 26, 2020, 6:14pm
3
My informal understanding is that Viewdata is meant to refer to the technology, and Prestel to one particular service. Wikipedia says this:
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Viewdata is a Videotex implementation. It is a type of information retrieval service in which a subscriber can access a remote database via a common carrier channel, request data and receive requested data on a video display over a separate channel. Samuel Fedida, who had the idea for Viewdata in 1968, was credited as inventor of the system which was developed while working for the British Post Office which was the operator of the national teleph...
See also
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Videotex (or interactive videotex) was one of the earliest implementations of an end-user information system. From the late 1970s to early 2010s, it was used to deliver information (usually pages of text) to a user in computer-like format, typically to be displayed on a television or a dumb terminal.
In a strict definition, videotex is any system that provides interactive content and displays it on a video monitor such as a television, typically ...