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.
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.
This isn't business news, it's tech history. It's not a company going down, it's a service which predated public use of the Internet, but was eventually superseded it.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
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
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
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 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
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. :-)
...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