Slashdot Mirror
Schluss For Germany's Oldest Online Service
Rolo Tomasi writes: "Germany's first online service, BTX (Bildschirmtext) is shutting down. BTX had a history of major security flaws, which made the Chaos Computer Club famous." Non-speakers might want to try a translation.
IT's always a shame to see a piece of computer history go away.
;)
Maybe we should set up a landmarks perservation kind of deally to prevent things like this from happening.
of course it would have to be open source
What do you expect? They can't get antything right over there...
Basically, the gist of the German -> English translation is, "WHO FUCKIN' CARES".
My *god*, Slashdot, GET SOME REAL STORIES!
This is far more interesting
techienews.net
yeah, im drunk.......
Website Hosting
Germans still used this up to now for the so called 'Classic' applications such as home banking. T-Online (large German ISP) was the one that kept this system up until now mostly for the homebanking applications, but they have now migrated it to regular TCP/IP protocols.
So now they can finally get rid of it.
Parting from the on-line dinosaur the oldest on-line service of Germany, the T-Online forerunner interactive videotext (VTX), is closed to 1 December.
" I am particularly pleased that this premiere in Berlin can take place, the city, in which before 100 years the introduction of the telephone began ", was pleased Federal Ministers of Post and Telecommunications Kurt Gscheidle during the international radio exhibition 1977. He had attended a world premiere, whose effects at that time still nobody could foresee in the August-hot halls under the radio tower: The Federal Postal Administration presented the interactive videotext (VTX) and opened thereby first only for a small set of selected users the on-line age in Germany.
1980 started a larger field test originally than interactive videotex of the conceived service with in each case 2000 users in Berlin and Duesseldorf. The technical equipment, which smoothed the way well two decades ago into the world of the country wide data network, consisted of a BTX decoder for the television, tormenting a slow modem and a keyboard. In few weeks VTX is now an final section of German on-line history. At the end of November the country wide 01910-Einwahlzugaenge are cut. Nostalgiker find thereafter only over a special issue and at gepfefferten prices to end of 2001 an acces, before T-Online switches off its BTX Zugangsknoten finally.
" it is not worthwhile itself for us no more to let the platform continue ever fewer customer ", says Telekom speaker Ulrich Lissek in Bonn, which belonged once even with its Atari to the generation of the BTX pioneers. Seven years after the start surften already 95,600 VTX user by the network, in the year of the wall case counted the Telekom 195,000 members of the on-line municipality. The break-through for VTX came in the middle of the 90's, after also a first hakeliger Internet acces became possible over the BTX platform and enamels could be exchanged over the boundaries of the closed user group away. The BTX guest Internet ate his host quite fast. Today T-Online in Germany counts 5.6 million customer. " only some thousands use of it the old BTX technique ", say Lissek.
Navigation in the on-line service was made similarly as at that time with the Microsoft operating system DOS by a number of kryptischer keyboard instructions. In each case between an asterisk and a lozenge character were to be indicated an instruction or after the model of the telephone network a page number. The first forms of the e-Commerce decrease/go back on VTX. Goods orders and for instance the attendance of expensive Erotik services were paid over the phone bill, which led again and again because of some windy Abzocker to legal arguments. Publishing houses opened liable to pay the costs their professional data bases, large distributing houses belonged to the BTX pioneers. Main application was however the on-line Banking very safe because of the closed user set.
Legal basis of the BTX service was originally a convention, which set and differently than to Internet an anonymous use excluded high hurdles for the acces. Who wanted to place a supply like today to Internet homepage into the network, first a aufwaendige permission procedure had to pass through. Also the use with basic charges of eight Marks per month presupposed a complicated registration procedure. Additionally relatively high telephone and BTX fees resulted.
VTX, 1977 of a working group in the post office Ministry still as " people teleprocessing system " planned, was also the base for first on-line-chops in Germany. Under still disputed circumstances it succeeded 1984 to a Aktionistem of the chaos computer club, Wau Holland, to use a safety gap. In the hay width unit journal of the ZDF it demonstrated, as ineffective a bank assault is in the comparison to the on-line tapped account. This brought the industry in sweating, helped however not against the largest Handicap of the text service: the absence of any pictures. Not only Hermann bricklayer, executive committee of institute for computer science at the University of Graz, had at that time granted VTX for the start because of a " peculiar backspace of the television to remote reading " no realistic chance of survival. 20 years later on-line history gives it right.
Seriously: is it necessary to hear when every new tech company that either a) had a bad business model or b) couldn't adjust to a change in markets, dies? It's just business!
No, this isn't a troll - I really do feel it's getting a bit OTT. Businesses die and start up the whole time, very few last that long, especially in a new and fast-changing market. It's often in fact more efficient to close one business and open a new one (rather than majorly change a business model) to respond to a large change in market conditions.
If there was something pertinent hidden deep in the text, my apologies - my german is by no means fantastic these days and I don't trust babelfish that well!
For years now, the common American penis bird has been a staple of every American's daily diet. Whether it be penis bird sandwiches, fried penis bird, or perhaps penis bird under glass (for the rich), we all have penis bird at least once a day. Many Americans have no clue how the penis bird became so important in the pyramid of a balanced diet, so in this article I will attempt to explain its history and why it is so useful.
In the early 1870s, Francis Zefran became the first penis bird breeder in North America. He started his famous Penis Bird Ranch in Canton, OH. At the time, not much was known of the penis bird's nutritional value, but the Penis Bird Ranch changed all of that. Not only did Francis Zefran raise penis birds to sell their colorful plumes (a VERY lucrative business), he also set up the world's first research lab dedicated solely to the study of the penis bird.
The lab found many interesting things. First, it was discovered that the penis bird was actually semi-sentient. Second, the scientists found that the meat of the penis bird was high in protein, vitamin A, vitamin B, and calcium, while low in fat, cholestorol, and sodium. Never before had such a nutritious meal been had without supplement or fortification. The scientists of the lab recommended immediately that the penis bird become a part of every American's daily diet.
When the news of the penis bird's usefulness reached president Rutherford B. Hayes, he was absolutely ecstatic. You see, President Hayes owed a number of favors to Francis Zefran because as I said earlier, the penis bird plume trade was an extremely lucrative business and Mr. Zefran was important in getting RBH elected through a number of monetary gifts. President Hayes immediately asked Congress to pass what we all know today as the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption Act.
The act did a number of things to make the penis bird a daily meal, most important of which was the requirement that for every four people in a household, one penis bird must consumed every day. Another thing the act did was create an artificial monopoly for Francis Zefran's Penis Bird Industries. The act stated that the only supplier of penis bird meat in the US would be PBI. As one would imagine, this quickly made Francis Zefran into the richest man in the world. He was soon a multi-billionaire (quadrillionaire with today's inflation). Never before had a single man seen such wealth.
Many challenges were made to the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption Act, and several even made it the Supreme Court. It was argued that the act was unconstitutional and went against liberty itself, but once the detractors tasted delicious penis bird meat for the first time, they immediately dropped their cases and followed the law to the letter. We all know today that penis bird is the most delicious meat man has ever known, but at that time, the only meats people ate were pork and beef.
In the early 1970s, though, challenges to the act began again. Many argued that the monopoly given to Penis Bird Industries by the act was in all ways unamerican. The Supreme Court finally agreed, and in 1974, Section II of the act was struck down. This in effect opened the market to competition for all.
Today, Penis Bird Industries is almost no more. Today we have the market leader Penis Bird Meat International facing against Penissoft, a recent startup. Where will the future lead the penis bird market? Only time will tell us, but one thing is certain: penis birds are here to stay!
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-klerck
late post for HD
I have used the system a little, and found it to be very functional. More than a decade ago, you could already get train and airline schedules, make reservations, buy tickets, go mail-order shopping, and do many other things. All that worked with pretty simple and cheap clients that you just turned on an they worked. I don't know what they did on the server side, but it worked as well. Most of the e-commerce and business ideas you see today on the web were already there (perhaps a good place to dig for prior art to challenge those annoying e-commerce patents).
It was always a piece of crap, the BTX search engine mostly found links to some hardcore site, where you should press 19 (for OK) to pay 9,99 DM to see the page, no matter what your search really was. It was expensive, I heard in france they have/had something similar, which was a big success, as the france telekom gave the terminals you needed, before it was possible to use it with a PC, for free. Where the German Telekom (former Deutsche Post), as always, ripped you off and took a fortune for those dummy terminals.
Michael
Yes it is!
When the CCC found an exploit in the system, they informed (the then still state owned monopolistic mail/phone company) Deutsche Bundespost. The DBP said there was nothing wrong, so the CCC used the exploit to get the computer from a bank to call up their page again and again, untill the bank owed the more than DM 10,000. They gave it back the next day, and BTX got a very bad press.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
"Non-speakers might want to try a translation."
This is so frustrationg! I speak quite well, and still can't read a lick of that damn German. They didn't use the word Ubermensch anywhere in the whole article !!!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Of course, probably everyone in the Universe (except for me that is, up until about 20 min ago) already knows that Bruce Sterling has written (or co-written or edited) a number of sci fi and/or "cyber" books. This one, however, (which is not fiction--we hope :-) ) deals mostly with
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Non-speakers might want to try a translation.
Or learn to speak first.
If you look at the bottom of the page, you'll notice that it's older than a year. BTX has already been shut down.
I know that Slashdot is US-centric, but I wouldn't have thought that this results in semi-important European news being announced with a delay of one year.
The CCC also get a mention in the online book called The Underground: the story of the Australian hacker scene during the 80's and 90's. It's an eye-opening read.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
You probably should have said non-German speakers. After all, a non-speaker wouldn't need a translator if they were simply capable of listening.
you could uns them with standart telephone cards (of course, as it was from deuthe telekom just as the public phones).
they might well be gone for a while, you oversee them easyly if you got broadband at home...
france has something similar, minitel. is it still in use? would be a shame if all the minitel terminals people in france have at home would become useless.
but maybe someone comes up with a creative way of using them for something cool.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
the equivalent in France, Minitel, still works,
although for the first time it is reported
that online purchases on the Web overtook
those on Minitel this Xmas. (talking 10^9 $ here).
Talk about a business model : reliable content
due to synchronous, non packet data transmission,
billed on the minute with a large number of
phony pRon sites. I think that in 20 years
more than 10 billion $ net profit were taken
by France Telecom and all the content providers.
about 10 million terminals were given for free
to telephone line suscribers ; I think
that it was the initial leverage that BTX
neglected to apply.
The system still rocks to find a phone #,
book train tickets or check a bank account balance : the system boots in less than 10 s and
connects to the site in about the same duration.
The bandwidth admittely sucks, as well as the
graphics (about the same half graphics characters as IBM 850), but to get something done quickly
and reliably, it still is unbeatable.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Another limiting factor was the use of outdated IBM minicomputers ("system 1" IIRC) as nodes even when PCs became much faster at a fraction of the cost in the mid 80s. This held the cost high, the flexibility at a minimum and the throughput so low as to be unusable for most anything but home banking. The things you can get away with as a monopolist. :-(
In the 90s they finally managed to upgrade their nodes to 2400 baud and even later to a whopping 19200 or something like that. Always two to five years behind the times and with the independent Internet running circles around it, the service finally died. A long struggle it was.
I just checked on German Telekom's subsidiary t-online web site. The non-banking applications are to shut down on December 31, 2001. However, home banking service applications are to continue to run on the existing hardware using the existing protocols indefinitely. Doesn't sound quite dead to me. Perhaps Buffy needs to lend a hand. :-)
When I worked in France in 1993 for Molex I connected our AS/400 RPG (yes, RPG!) order-entry program to Minitel so that suppliers could enter orders directly. It was as simple as rewriting the program to work on Minitel-size screens (40x20?) and installing a "custom" PC to act as a gateway between the AS/400 and the Minitel hookup. Can't recall if it was dialup or leased line. Ah, nostalgia... must find that waitress Sylvie's phone number...
That is TSCHUSS (with an umlaut over the U) not schluss. It's a way of saying goodbye. You must have learned to speak German where Tony Blair learned to spell "toomorrow" ... or is that "toomorro"!
...might want to spend that extra year in pre-school, till they perfect basic syntax and fine motor skills.
Oh, yeah, and lay off on the links to 'goatse.cx', you trolling wankers!
- undoware.ca