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Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983?
jfruh writes "An amazing pair of videos from the AT&T archives tout a service called Viewtron that brought much of what we expect from the modern Internet to customers' homes in 1983. Online news, banking services, restaurant reviews, shopping, e-mail — all were available on your TV set, controlled by a wireless infrared keyboard. The system had 15,000 customers in cities on the U.S. east coast, but was shut down after $50 million was spent on it. But why did it flop? Was the world just not ready for it?"
I didnt see it so i'm asking... was it a walled garden with adverts?
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Probably because it was ridiculously limited by Internet standards. The Internet took off because you could do pretty much anything with it. The only limits were the technology of the computers and connections, and that technology increased and continues to increase exponentially. The services that AT&T offered were simply not worth the expense. The Internet, when it was eventually privatized, was.
nobody had a computer at home
Enough said.
It had a high initial equipment investment, was slow (painfully slow), didn't look all that good compared to actual TV, had hourly charges, and very limited content. Users couldn't make their own content. The service was only for consumption. By the time the internet really took off, in the mid 90's, speeds were faster, the images were good, and there was a lot more content to peruse. What really let the internet take off was the fact that people could easily create their own content.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
The internet just doesn't work as well with TVs as it does with PC's. Look at internet-connected smart TVs today. A recent study says that 50% of them are never connected to the internet. I think it's because people don't want to "do things" with their TVs. They just want to sit back and watch. PCs and more recently smartphones are associated with doing things. People saw the PC with a keyboard and associated it with getting stuff done. The internet was an instrument to get more stuff done faster and with people/businesses who don't reside in the same town you do. People have used phones to get things done, coordinate with people, call their banks, etc. People only associate TVs with sitting back and watching. Back then the internet wasn't fast enough to do this, so people weren't interested with connected TVs (and apparently 50% of people with internet capable TVs still aren't interested in connected TVs).
http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/history/viewtron.htm
At launch, they cost $900 and were reduced to $600 when demand was soft. Further, a subscription in Miami cost $12 a month, plus long distance phone charges, if any. There also were additional charges for Hallmark Cards (electronic mail) of $2 per card or 50 cents for stationery. After May, 1984, the partners gave up trying to sell the Sceptre Terminals and changed the pricing system to be $39.95 a month including terminal rental.
Too goddamned expensive. $900 in 1983 was $2,080 in 2012 dollars.
Who the hell is willing to throw down $2000 for an untested system? Maybe if they'd started at $39.95 a month ($92.37 in 2012 dollars) it would've been able to get off the ground, but the original price point likely killed it.
There was Minitel in France, and Prestel in the UK, that had some success.
I hate to say this. But I think it is PORN that help the internet fly.
If you were online in 1983, a BBS was the place to be. FidoNet was founded in 1984, so it was the dawn of an exciting era.
Exactly. People don't love the Internet because it's a glorified interactive TV or a fancy product catalog. It's a completely different communications platform, where you can do pretty much whatever you want.
There was no self-publishing, it was not a platform, not an infrastructure, it was a centralized service that didn't interact with similar services from competitors.
Connect-from-home services like these popped up *all the time* in the 70s, 80s and early 90s from cable companies, newspapers, telcos and similar -- but they all died because they were all walled gardens designed to keep out the competitors of their parent companies.
The only services that thrived were the ones that had no parent companies with business models to protect -- AOL and Compuserve -- which died off when they connected themselves to the government/academic internet thingy and real competition started.
What's interesting is how many of these walled gardens evolved from voice-based IVR systems hosted by major newspapers in the 70s-90s where you could dial up and listen to your horroscope, sports, movie showtimes, etc. over the phone. Those systems got more and more and more complex over time, and if you carried a wallet-card of numbers and keypad commands, you could access a world of information from payphones or borrowed landlines while you were on the go! For a small monthly fee, you could get a voicemail box that you could check while you were on the go if you wanted to stay reachable but couldn't afford a pager.
Yep. I started using the internet in the mid-1990's when it had a few years on it but still wasn't quite universal like it is now. When one of the teachers at school was showing this cool new technology they were even describing all the now long forgotten things like Gopher and Finger. The main thing I saw that kicked off widespread usage was simple: "unlimited" usage policies.
Nobody really was interested when you paid for an AOL account and got 5 hours online. They weren't interested when they bumped that up to 20, 40, nor 80. People really didn't seem to bother much until they were told "Here, use this all you want.". Having the average price of a dial-up account fall from $30-40 down to $10-15 per month certainly didn't hurt either.
Its kinda funny though that now that as a society we're hooked, it's trending in the opposite direction. A cellular data plan is typically $30+ and has limits that you can actually hit pretty easily with normal usage patterns.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Like many, I took the Internet for granted as a geek-only thing and was surprised when it caught on with the general public in the mid-90's. One explanation I've heard for its sudden adoption is that the web brought pictures to the Internet for the first time. And the 100x100 3-bit Wizard and the Princess graphics shown in this Viewtron don't count.
They were the most popular online service although there may have been one or two others. If you had a Commodore 64, an Apple IIe, or any of the various computers of the day, and you had a modem, you were good to go. It was expensive though, and relatively few people were on it, but it was pretty cool at the time.
Sorry for the self-reply...there's a nice comprehensive history of these types of systems at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex . AT&T's was just one of a whole bunch, of which Minitel was the only one which really got traction.
Yes, the cell carriers will have a disruptive change hit them at some point, though. Their pricing is exorbitant and can't be sustained.
== Just my opinion(s)
Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983?
Viewtron was just another America Online, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc (but even worse, because it was also hardware based). A proprietary walled garden of content that nickel and dimed users to death, with very limited selection, slow performance, and expensive hardware. Take the banking for example. How many banks do you think were plugged into their service? I bet it was only one, and that was more for bragging rights and an advertising tic mark than anything else. 10 cents to send an email? Not exactly going to foster an explosive growth of online communication that way.
Here's why the Internet "won", and this service and the others I listed that were like it have gone the way of the dodo. The internet is open. It is open standards, on top of more open standards, on top of even more open standards. It wasn't built for consumers. It wasn't built for money grubbing corporations to rule over. First and foremost it was built to move data between any two computers on a network that could grow to fast proportions. THAT is why it is a success. I was fortunate to have been on the internet before the www, back when usenet, email, ftp, irc and gopher were king. Even before the glitz and glamor of HTML and the internet that the world knows now, the power of the internet was abundantly clear, even though the learning curve and interface weren't conducive to the average person (ahhh, the days of ftping pirated Amiga software from college servers).
Viewtron put the cart in front of the horse - it was meant to make money and grant control to a single corporate entity. It was not about open networking and raw connectivity between computing devices. That is "Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983".
Better known as 318230.
Yet they'll gladly buy iPhones.
The people that made the internet viable early on were people who both understood what the network could provide and wanted it.
Those of us who spent our nights dialing between BBSes and trading phone numbers were waiting in the shadows for something more connected. Once the internet became more available (i.e. not just military or universities) climbed on board as soon as we could. It is this kind of group that made the network valuable. This Viewtron system was very closed and controlled. As a user you had access to commercial stuff, but nothing shared between users other than email. The one major thing it missed was porn -- 20/20.
Otherwise it is a barely usable brick targeted to people who don't care anyway. It's a certain flop. No surprise.
It is interesting how forward thinking it was though. 15000 people is quite a few, but only 1/1000th of what was needed to recover costs.
I wrote the following article during my tenure as the chief architect for the mass-market videotex experiment conducted by AT&T and Knight-Ridder News called "Viewtron" -- a service of the joint-venture company, Viewdata Corporation of America.
As can be sensed in the article, I had encountered some fairly frustrating situations and was about to be told by the corporate authorities that my telecomputing architecture, which would have provided a dynamically downloaded Forth graphics protocol in 1983 evolving into a distributed Smalltalk-like environment beginning around 1985, would be abandoned due to a corporate commitment to stick with Tandem Computers as the mainframe vendor -- a choice which I had asserted would not be adequate for my architecture. (At least Postscript survived.) I was subsequently offered the head telecomputing software position at Prodigy by IBM and turned it down when they indicated they would not support my architecture either, due to a committment to limit merchant access to their network to only those who had a special status with the service provider (IBM/CBS/Sears). The distributed Smalltalk system was specifically designed to allow the sort of grassroots commerce now emerging in the world wide web -- particularly as people recognize JavaScript is similar to the Self programming language and the Common Lisp Object System. This wasn't in keeping with IBM's philosophy at that time since they had yet to be humbled by Bill Gates.
My independent attempt at developing this sort of service was squashed by the U.S. government when it provided UUCP/Usenet service to a competitor in San Diego and would not offer me the same subsidy via MILnet -- a network that was not for public access, by law, and which was exclusively for military use. My complaints to DoD investigators resulted in continual "We're looking into it." replies.
Videotex Networking and The American Pioneer
by Jim Bowery (circa 1982)
With the precipitous drop in the price of information technology, computer-based communication has come within the technical and economic reach of the mass-market. The term generally used for this mass-market is "videotex" because it reduces the cost of entry into the home by using the most ubiquitous video display device, the television screen, to deliver its service.
The central importance of this new market is that it brings the capital cost of establishing a publication with nation-wide distribution to within the reach of the mass-market as well. This means that anyone who is a "consumer" of information on this new technology can also be a "producer" of information. The distinction between editorial staff and readership need no longer be a function of who has how much money, but rather, who has the greatest consumer appeal. The last time an event of this magnitude took place was the invention of the offset printer which brought the cost of publication to within the reach of small businesses. That democratization of cultural evolution was protected in our constitution under freedom of the press. Freedom of speech was intended for the masses. In this new technology, the distinction between press and speech is beginning to blur. Some individuals and institutions see this as removing the new media from either of the constitutional protections rather than giving it both. They see a great danger in allowing the uncensored ideas of individuals to spread across the entire nation within seconds at a cost of only a few cents. A direct quote from a person with authority in the management of this new technology: "We view videotex as 'we the institutions' providing 'you the people' with information." I wonder what our founding fathers would have thought of a statement like that.
Mass-media influences cultural evolution in profound ways. Rather that assuming a paternalistic posture, we should be objecti
Seastead this.
It's a centralized walled garden where you can't go off network, with no appeal to hackers because you had to have a license to create anything. It had no DNS, and was menu driven. If it had taken off, it would have failed too, due to limitations in the broadcast spectrum that they obviously didn't think about. That's why it didn't take off.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Part of the sudden adoption was the free market at work, at least in the states. The 1996 telco reform act allowed companies other than the monopolies to handle local phone calls. That's why there were thousands of ISPS that opened up overnight, cheap phone lines. It also had a nice confluence of technology and society. Technology was also improving so that suddenly all those racks and racks of modems could be jammed into rack mount cards cheaply. Also you had all those college kids who liked it and got into the real world and still wanted the convenience of email and other services.. That's the power of the free market.
Of course Bush Jr put Powel's son in charge of the FCC, they rolled back the telco reform because monopolies liked being monopolies, and suddenly every non-monopoly ISP goes out of business. The US bandwidth speeds become a joke compared to the rest of the modern world. That's corporatism at work.
I think You'll find is a case of Need Vs Want. It sounds like Viewtron was for entertainment Purposes Only. I was in I.T back then doing all the home setup's etc. Most of the customers where getting this "Internet thing" because they could connect to work from it. You'd tell them that they could read news etc and they where amazed. Company paying for for the connections back then, and been able use it for personal use as well what a great bonus. Alot of companies started using it for work from home style setup's as well, It saved them money, and made people happy, it also ment your sales staff etc could check in when not in the office. Business was a big driver back then, not just for the reason above, but i'm quite sure that's one of the main reasons the "internet took off" compared to various other services in the day.
Slow, expensive, crappy, no porn, etc. are all good reasons Viewtron failed. But the biggest failure was it didn't connect people to people. It could connect people to institutions but that is about as fun as paying bills. The best applications on the early internet were about connecting people to each other. I discovered the internet in the late 80s when I went to college and Usenet was a revelation. There were discussions on every topic imaginable. It was like having a living encyclopedia. You could ask experts about subatomic particle at sci.physics or join in a debate about whether hamstering is an urban ledgend in alt.sex.bondage. It was that critical mass and diversity of people connected together that provided the vitality for the internet to hit the big time.
-- QED
Not so bad when you realize that's about the same AT&T is charging (adjusted for inflation) for SMS messages today!
The Internet didn't take off in '83 because computers weren't ready for it. Even after various networks started to work in university settings, it didn't become popular until the early web browsers and servers provided some content for people to... pirate.
The CS guys who used to hang around in the NeXT lab at the university were experimenting with digitizing music in '88, too, but you didn't see MP3 players until well after that point. They weren't compressing though, and one song took up a huge chunk of the optical disk.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is why Hutchison 3G is the fastest growing mobile carrier in the UK. Shameless plug, because I use it and think it's the best thing since punch cards, for £15/mo and no contract you get 300 voice minutes on any UK network, 3,000 SMS texts and the ONLY TRULY UNLIMITED INTERNET* of ANY UK carrier.
*I managed somehow to cause my local tower to blow a chip, rendering it inoperable. I called tech support, and in two days they had not only replaced the chip, they had replaced the tower with a bigger one. When I asked them if my downloading 6GB/day (low average) might have had anything to do with the tower failure, the reply stunned me:
"You paid for unlimited bandwidth, use it for what you want - torrents, web server, whatever. It's your bandwidth. Our job is to make sure you get what you paid for"
I mean, NO FAIR USE POLICY!? That's unheard of! Especially on a cellular plan!
This is why I'm not going back to unreliable, capped, ripoff-merchant Virgin Media.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The simple reason other than cost was that there was nothing to see. Of all the services advertised, only one or two would appeal to the home user. I can do banking at home? Too bad my bank isn't supported. Check the weather? Sure I'll turn on the tv and computer, spend $10 and 30 mins downloading all the menus and eventually the local weather, or I can just pick up the paper that was delivered this morning. I can check my stocks and oh look, my stocks went up in value. Too bad my stock gains were negated by the costs it takes to check my stocks on this damn machine.
Now news and sports. You're starting to get into an area that people want to see, unfortunately the cost, speed and quality pales in comparison to other services like tv or the paper. Even then after you spent a few minuets getting the latest news, what the hell do you do with it? Play a few crappy games that cost you way to much just to stay online?
Think about how you use the internet. Do you spend all of you time looking at stocks or just on cooperate web sites like FOX or CNN your you bank website? Sure you might use them, (FOX? Really?) but you spend most of your time looking at contend created by regular users. Web comics, blogs, videos and forums. People that made stuff shared it on the internet and that is what got other people online. They saw it, asked for more and then made something them selves.
In France a simmilar system took off, because they gave out free terminals. In Germany some TV-sets could be ordered with buildt-in Bildschirmtext decoders.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBfvIh2K4G0
The problem with all of those services was that they were walled gardens, so they only had very limited use. It was sold as a service, complete with content. It actually cost a significant amount of money to get your own page which. That, and the possibility to have people pay per page access or minute (WTF) caused the system to be used only for for 2 applications, Banking, and Pornography.
It had nothing to do with the bandwidth or the graphic capabilities. Back in the 1990s when the transition happened you were lucky to get 200 characters per second from some US site while Bildschirmtext (the German variant) already have you additional content from CD-Roms. From the users perspective the Internet was a big step down, but since it was so free and open and not just a "business model" all the good content was on it. The Internet was "free as speech" even though it was a bit more expensive and slower. Of course there were also BBSes which had a certain amount of popularity among private homes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBfvIh2K4G0
For something to succeed, technology has to be up to a certain standard. You can have the idea for something and build the basis of it often long before tech is ready to make it truly useable. The Internet started to take off when a few things had happened:
1) Enough tech for Internet services had been developed and was in a useful state. Thing like the web. The whole HTML/HTTP thing made the Internet a hell of a lot more useful for normal people. However it wasn't there in 1983, it didn't get developed until 1990 and then took some time before it was well hashed out with apps to support it.
2) Enough computer tech to make it useful. Mostly modems. As the parent noted, back in the early 80s you were talking 1200 baud which is pretty painful for anything but text, and even slow for that. Wasn't until things were 10x that fast or more that you really had the basics of what you needed for reasonable speeds on more enriched content.
3) Enough communications infrastructure and tech to make it affordable. The big connections ISPs needed between each other had to drop in price to where dialup could be offered to end users for a reasonable price. Most people weren't going to drop hundreds of dollars a month on access to something that was mostly a toy at the time and that meant there was only so much an ISP could afford to pay for bandwidth.
Only when all the technology was right could the Internet ever really take off. Hence it took until the early to mid 90s before everything was in place. Then indeed it did start exploding. However it really wasn't going to happen earlier because the requisite tech didn't exist. There's a difference between being able to do something, and able to do it well, and you have to do something well enough before the mass market will be interested.
As another example take compressed/downloadable music. The basic tech existed for that long before it got big. However the problem was that everything wasn't in place for it to work well. I remember playing with MP3 in 1995 (which of course wasn't the first compressed format) and loving it. However I had to drop to DOS to play the files, it took 100% of my CPU time and the little the higher level OS took was too much. Likewise transferring them was really not feasible. A 5 minute song ran you like 4.8MB which would take 46 minutes on my mighty 14.4 (28.8s were too expensive for me then) meaning an album could take days to send. None of this is to mention the time ripping and encoding took (over an hour a song easy).
It was something I messed with only because I'm an audio geek and I thought it was cool. However later computers got fast enough to play MP3s not just in Windows, but in the background, songs could transfer in a couple minutes, and so on. All of a sudden there was interest in this (around about 1999/2000).
The fundamental tech to make it possible in theory wasn't enough, and never is. Tech as a whole has to be to a level to make it practical, useful.
You know how fast are the network connections in between cities back in the early 1980's?
300 baud - that's the speed for an "ultra fast" modem
Yes, we do have "networks" back then, it's called "FidoNet", and it's the sysops (system operators) who are carrying out all those internode connections
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It was called CompuServe, and IIRC was $3 per month. But there were a lot of reasons being online didn't take off.
One was technology. 300 baud was the norm, far slower than 28.8, The most powerful PC at the time (I'll get disagreement over this; Amiga for one) was the IBM XT. 8088 processor, 64k of memory, and a humungous ten meg hard drive. Cost was prohibitive, an IBM cost thousands of dollars.
There was little content and no search capabilities.
It was a walled garden.
"Why in the world do you have a computer?" Only us nerds had computers back then.
It was text only, with no hypertext.
I found it to be pretty useless. Later in the decade I was on the BBSes on a used IBM with 28.8, and even then my online presence was mostly sharing software. An email could take days to be delivered, since the BBSes were seldom online 24/7 and few had many connections. I still got most of my software on floppies from shareware stores.
The internet didn't happen because nobody and nothing was ready for it. The internet happened when it was time for it to happen.
It was the 80's, everyone was too busy with hairspray, good music and doing coke to care about the internet.
I saw far more hair spray in the '60s, most music sucked than as badly as now (although thankfully disco had died and there was a lot of good rock and roll). Most music has always sucked. The "90% of everything is crap" has always been true. And coke was always too expensive for most people to do much of; coke was mostly a yuppie thing.
Free Martian Whores!
btw, I altered my username because at the time student's usernames were THEIR SSN :-(
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1982 22:04
From: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
To: BOB @ UCSC-Site
cc: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
Subject: Re: Monitor
In-Reply-To: Your message of 24 Jun 1982 09:19
Message-ID: 0322.06.24.1982.22.04.44 @ UCSC-Site
This terminal is quite nice for $399. It's an RCA. It has a modem built in, color graphics, and sound from 14 Hz to 230 KHz. (Why the heck do you need 230 KHz. I probably can't hear past 15KHz.) It even has a white noise generator. (Don't ask why).
The graphics are pretty HI-RES, 240x192, but it takes forever to draw at 300 baud. One could make impressive graphs but one won't ever see Pac-Man here! You can also hook up a cassette recorder to store a heck of a lot of data for off-line viewing.
I got a free hour on CompuServe with it. Ever been on that? They say it's simple, but it took me the whole hour just to look for one thing. The say it's menu driven. GEEEEEEZZ, they must have their menu's nested 50 levels deep!
I was looking for the multi-user Star-Trek game that I read about. Also the CB simulation (Randall probably wrote it).
The story of my quest:
After drifting thru 10 pages of menus, I found the newspapers that were on-line, so I choose New York Times. They wouldn't print the %&$#& thing out unless I subscribed! The subscription was free but they wanted name, add.... I said "SCREW IT". I could imagine how many menu's were on the other side of that subscription.
Now I had to "back up" thru the menus before I could move on. After another 10 mins. I found the home entertainment menu! I was getting closer. I didn't see Star-Trek but I did see "ELIZA - Artificial Intelligence". I decided to try it out, real quick.
This program CompuServe has (called DISPLA) is polite. Instead of saying #SCHED 1234 it says "Please wait. I am processing your request." Sure, I think that the computer down there realizes that it's getting paid by the hour. After 2-3 mins., it starts "Tell me what's on your mind." After 5 mins I was ready to leave, "QUIT, BYE, STOP, " nothing worked. She just kept saying, "Your being short with me.". I was getting desperate, I started punching all the control codes I could. I stoped the program but I hung the terminal. Oh, well. Call back. Back to the first menu page. But I was getting better, I typed "GO HOM" and I went straight to the home entertainment section. After about 200 more menus (estimate) I found "CB simulation"! Quick, read doc. Got it, run CB. "Please wait......". After 5 mins it comes back "Your free hour is up. Would you like to subsribe?".
All that and I never saw the program. For $5.00/hr plus $2 for Telenet, they can forget it.
THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME ON THE B6900 !!!!!!!!!
It's just that it wasn't called "the Internet", and that in part was because it was composed of disparate but interconnecting pieces. By 1983, Usenet/UUCPnet had about 500 nodes; the next year it had doubled to around 1000. CSnet was a couple of years old and was growing. Same for BITNET. And of course the ARPAnet was still expanding.
There was no web, of course, but the web isn't the Internet. And a lot of people didn't use computers to access it -- they used terminals, connected to computers via serial lines or phone lines. But it was growing quickly, it was used heavily by folks in academia and research, and a lot of experiments/projects were underway.
Granted, the "club" was limited: you either had to work in the right places, or be a student there. But it was already large and growing. (And one of the ironies that often strikes me is that it was quite routine for Unix users to edit with vi, format documents with troff, read mail with Berkeley mail, and issue remote execution/file retrieval requests...all at the commad line. And I don't mean CS types: I mean everyone from undergraduates to the secretarial staff. A lot of them were very fast and efficient with those tools. Compare/contrast with today. This moment of rose-colored geezer reflection brought to by the letters V, A and X and the number 780.)
I just have to salute all the Sysops out there, who somehow managed to keep the world-wide FidoNet (and several other smaller net) working, despite all odds
What happened on Dec-31-1983 illustrates the greatness of the many un-named Sysops all around the world:
Someone from Australia posted a "Happy New Year" greeting on one of the Fidonet newsgroups on Dec-31-1983
The message reached America some 5 hours later (to those un-initiated, FidoNet messages did not travel on light-speed, unlike Emails nowadays) and someone in America replied his "Happy New Year" greeting
That reply message took another 8 hours or so to got back to Australia, just in time for the original Australian message poster to receive on 23:57 that very same day
It was just a message, a simple message, but behind it, the round-trip message had travelled more than 60 hops
Meaning - for that single message, it took the effort of more than 60 Sysops to make it happened
For this, please allow me to salute all the Sysops for a job Well Done !!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Boot times increased rather than decreased until this century.
You obviously never used an old mini or mainframe that took minutes or tens of minutes to boot. 5 to 10 was a big improvement! ;-)
But it was more like 5-10 seconds on my IBM. But if you had a Commodore or the like with the OS in ROM boot speeds were far faster than the IBM.
My old Tandy 1000 SL, which was basically an 8086 IBM-PC compatible design, had the DOS kernel and COMMAND.COM in ROM. It appeared as "C:" -- the machine had no hard disk. So despite only having a floppy disk, turn it on, and the OS was ready in a second or two. It was nice.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I started in this field in 1983, so I've watched -- *participated in* -- the rise of the Internet to what it is today. This thing isn't remotely like the Internet. It's more like a very successful category of products that the Internet swept away a decade or so later: on-line services like Delphi (founded 1983), CompuServe (founded 1969, consumer services launched in 1978), and AOL (founded 1983, consumer services launched 1985). These companies offered what amounted to a digital shopping mall, building private, closed infrastructure in which business partners could sell services and products to subscribers.
Al Gore introduced the term "Information Superhighway" in 1978, and in the early years of the Internet we geeks often scoffed at the simplistic metaphor; but it turns out he was describing an important property of the Internet that Delphi, CompuServe and AOL didn't have. The Internet is not an information *service*; it's infrastructure. Like a superhighway, *anyone* can get on it and go anywhere they like. That was the point of the metaphor: it's about how consumers and companies used the Internet to connect with each other without a gatekeeper, not the technicalities of how internetworking is implemented. Today we'd call this property "network neutrality".
Now the fact that access speeds have increased from 300 baud, and that people have decent video instead of some kind of RF to NSTC TV box, and that they have highly capable web browsers ... all this *contributes* to the success of the Internet. But it's not the essential thing. 1983 was pre-Google; a time when libraries still had card catalogs. Getting information was a laborious process. The success of on-line dial-up services like AOL in the late 80s and early 90s shows there was plenty of demand for addressing this problem, even if it were crude by today's standards. But as soon as the value of information accessible by the Internet exceeded what any one company could cobble together, all those dial-up services were doomed.
It's worth considering that there's nothing to prevent someone from resurrecting the information shopping mall business model, using the computers and broadband access most people enjoy in their homes today. You could make a site the customer would log into with his browser, and which becomes the focus of all his Internet use. The reason nobody has done this is that consumers vastly prefer the network neutrality model to the shopping mall model.
The only way to resurrect the shopping mall model is to have a captive set of users you can *force* into using the mall. That means being a regional monopoly in broadband services, or being a mobile carrier with user locked into contracts. The dream of locking subscribers into network providers' services is still alive as a dream, if not as competitive business model. If you want to see the closest modern analog to the service depicted in TFA, look at the lame information services provided by mobile carriers such as Verizon or Sprint. Anyone seriously interested in doing the kinds of things provided by those services would much prefer to use his *choice* of services (e.g., Pandora, Gmail) over a smart phone than to take whatever the mobile carrier offers.
So to recap, the services depicted in the videos were commonplace shortly after its airing (although not with a crappy set-top box), but as soon as network-neutral technology (TCP/IP, HTTP) people abandoned them for the greater freedom of the web.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Remember paying for long distance? That was the main thing that kept services like this, AOL, Prodigy, etc... out of our home in the 80s. It wasn't until the mid to late 90s when there were local internet providers in most small towns that the old pre-internet networks started offering the 800 numbers. As a geek growing up in a small town BBSs and online services were a like a myth. Sure I'd heard the stories but it wasn't anything that was ever going to be a part of my reality.
can you READ at a speed of greater than 300 baud?
in short bursts, yes (30 characters per second), comprehension goes out the window after a few lines, but I used to watch BBS posts scroll in at 30cps and would often just let them scroll by when they weren't very interesting, pause the feed when I actually wanted to read what was there.
Consider, also, the competition for advertising: bulk mailed glossy brochures - for less than $1, they could reach a customer with 100 pages of color photos and text - most of the marketing departments couldn't think fast enough to need to change their message more than once every few months, and plain text still is unable to grab the attention of 99% of the buying public.
First of all, AT&T's Viewdata was a "walled garden" (if you want to call it that). You could choose from the selections they provided, and pay by the minute for the privilege. For most folks, it was a long distance connection, too. It wasn't too early, it was totally impractical. No fun at 300 baud - when you could get it to go that fast.
When BBS systems started to show up, there was a reason for people to use them. No "per minute / byte" charges, and other local users to chat / message with. I started a BBS when high-speed modems were 2400 baud. Over a few years it grew to 25 incoming lines, 14,400 and 28,800 access - and a huge library of files. I remember spending big bucks to buy 688 Mb ESDI drives to expand the system. At $20 per year for a subscription, it made money very well. There was FidoNet - and QWK mail, etc. to move messages around. I wrote some of that mail software myself. Whew; 4 "nodes" per 386/25 using DesqView and QEMM and LanTastic. It worked well for the day.
But the fun was over too soon - as ISP systems became common and people could get on the Internet (remember Trumpet Winsock?) - that was the end of BBS systems. What us sysops did to help - we got people to buy modems and learn how to use them. We were the training wheels for the new Internet generation.