How a Grandmother Pioneered a Home Shopping Revolution

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How a Grandmother Pioneered a Home Shopping Revolution

Posted by samzenpus on Monday September 16, 2013 @06:08AM from the old-school dept.

eionmac writes in with a story about the humble beginnings of an industry that is worth over $186.1 billion in the UK alone. "Grandmother Jane Snowball, 72, sat down in an armchair in her Gateshead home in May 1984, picked up a television remote control and used it to order the groceries from her local supermarket. She was part of a council initiative to help the elderly. What she - and everyone else with her at the time - didn't realise was that her simple shopping list was arguably the world's first home online shop. With her remote control she used a piece of computer technology called Videotex. It sent the order down her phone line to the local Tesco - the goods were then packaged and delivered to her door. Mrs Snowball never saw a computer - her television linked her to the shop. 'What we effectively did was to take a domestic TV in a home and turn it into a computer terminal,' says Michael Aldrich, the man behind the technology for the system. 'That was the big leap.'"

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She was using PRESTEL by mjwalshe · 2013-09-16 06:14 · Score: 2

And for fucks sake PRESTEL was far more than a dumb Videotext information service.
1. Re:She was using PRESTEL by h4rr4r · 2013-09-16 06:21 · Score: 1
  
  I think the sum was simply converted to dollars, because this is an American website, and yes that means USA, based deal with it.
  Also the USD is the world's trade currency.
2. Re:She was using PRESTEL by TechyImmigrant · 2013-09-16 06:28 · Score: 1
  
  With an uplink speed of 75bps.
  
  --
  I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
3. Re:She was using PRESTEL by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-16 06:32 · Score: 1
  
  There was an experimental deployment of a viewdata system in South Florida in the late 1970's to early 1980's. With similar capabilities. Viewdata Corporation of America. Owned by Knight Ridder (news paper company).
4. Re:She was using PRESTEL by mpe · 2013-09-16 08:30 · Score: 1
  
  With an uplink speed of 75bps.
  
  Asymetric data links were around long before "broadband". Someone realised that they could add this onto a 1200 baud half duplex modem.
5. Re:She was using PRESTEL by Tuidjy · 2013-09-16 08:31 · Score: 1
  
  You could buy stuff on-line using France's Minitel long before '84. Definitely by '82, possibly earlier. A friend of mine living in Bretagne had been telling me about it for a few years before it came to Alsace.
  You needed a credit card, and preventing kids from shopping for porn was already a problem.
  
  --
  No good deed goes unpunished...
6. Re:She was using PRESTEL by mjwalshe · 2013-09-16 09:12 · Score: 1
  
  And you could certainty do some types of online transaction of PRESTEL at that time and that had been going for a while interesting that the Article makes ZERO mention of Samuel Fedida and all the work done At Martelsham and latterly at PRESTEL.
7. Re:She was using PRESTEL by John+Guilt · 2013-09-16 10:38 · Score: 1
  
  I think the point was not that it should actually run at those speeds, but rather that of bloat avoidance, that it should be well- (and sparely-) enough coded that it could do so, and so run superbly well with more modern data rates.
8. Re:She was using PRESTEL by adolf · 2013-09-16 13:51 · Score: 1
  
  Bah.
  The web is slower today than it ever was.
  It's not bloat, but merely progress.
  
  --
  Kid-proof tablet..
ALMOST there by i+kan+reed · 2013-09-16 06:20 · Score: 1

I have an available online grocery store, but it's a local affair that can't afford decent software for their site, which makes searching/sorting/filtering down to what you want difficult. I can tell it needs a big-money push.
1. Re:ALMOST there by MrEricSir · 2013-09-16 06:38 · Score: 1
  
  Would Google count as "big money"?
  
  --
  There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
2. Re:ALMOST there by i+kan+reed · 2013-09-16 06:44 · Score: 1
  
  Like amazon, they're starting in a big west-coast city as an experiment. I'm an eastcoaster.
3. Re:ALMOST there by MightyYar · 2013-09-16 08:01 · Score: 1
  
  Fresh Direct? It's NY-Centered, but they do other states now.
  
  --
  W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
4. Re:ALMOST there by CastrTroy · 2013-09-16 08:58 · Score: 1
  
  This is a big problem in general. Most local/independent businesses have little-to-no online presence. It doesn't really need a big money push. Just someone to develop some half decent service where the retailer doesn't have to manage a website. There's a couple offerings out there, but probably nothing that is geared towards grocery delivery .It wouldn't take a huge amount of cash or time to get a service online that would give them the basics. Especially for the players in this industry who already have a system that has most of the features.
  
  --
  
  Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Next Steps by fldsofglry · 2013-09-16 06:23 · Score: 2

Next steps:
1) Claim as prior art
2) Sue google, amazon, and every other ecommerce retailer out there
3) Make a gazillion dollars
4) Sit at home watching tv, surfing the net, and spending money online
Grandmother Jane Snowball's first shopping list by JoeyRox · 2013-09-16 06:24 · Score: 4, Funny

2 bottles of red wine
1 can of whip cream
4 extra large cucumbers
1 can Crisco cooking grease
1 box Trojan condoms
1 package of Marlboro Lights
1. Re:Grandmother Jane Snowball's first shopping list by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-16 06:38 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  None of which were available in Gateshead in 1984.
  More likely:
  2 bottles of Stout
  1 can tuna (for the cat)
  1 bag potatoes
  1 tub of lard (to cook the potatoes)
  1 tin corned beef
  1 pack golden virginia loose tobacco
2. Re:Grandmother Jane Snowball's first shopping list by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-16 07:37 · Score: 1
  
  If she had been in the USA:
  2 bottles of Budweiser
  1 can of catfood (for herself)
  10 bags of potato chips
  1 tub of mayonaise (to dip the chips)
  1 tin of butter cookies
  1 box of Virginia Slims
3. Re:Grandmother Jane Snowball's first shopping list by Zero__Kelvin · 2013-09-16 11:06 · Score: 1
  
  Hey! He finally got a date!
  
  --
  Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
4. Re:Grandmother Jane Snowball's first shopping list by wonkey_monkey · 2013-09-16 19:36 · Score: 1
  
  You forgot the hairnet.
  
  --
  systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Was it really the Grandmother by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-16 06:26 · Score: 1

Would this be like saying that I pioneered a home computing revolution because I bought an Apple ][?
I'm pretty sure this story should be about Michael Aldrich, not one of his users.
1. Re:Was it really the Grandmother by marcello_dl · 2013-09-16 06:47 · Score: 1
  
  where do you live, what version of locksmith you got? can you mail me a recent one? KTHXBYE
  
  --
  ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
2. Re:Was it really the Grandmother by sjames · 2013-09-16 07:24 · Score: 1
  
  If you were the first person to use a home computer, you would be *PART* of the revolution, sure.
3. Re:Was it really the Grandmother by mjwalshe · 2013-09-16 09:14 · Score: 1
  
  who I have never heard about (I worked for prestel back in the day) - and shall we say has a very gushing wikepeida page.
4. Re:Was it really the Grandmother by TechyImmigrant · 2013-09-16 10:45 · Score: 1
  
  These ones of course:
  ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/disk_utils/locksmith/
  
  --
  I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The first and last time by themushroom · 2013-09-16 06:29 · Score: 1

...anyone got their grandmother to shop online. :)

--
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
1. Re:The first and last time by CanHasDIY · 2013-09-16 06:36 · Score: 2
  
  ...anyone got their grandmother to shop online. :)
  That joke made sense 20 years ago; not so much today. Even old-school, Luddite-esque hillbillies like my dad (who is a grandfather almost a dozen times over) use Amazon to buy shit in 2013.
  Namely fishing lures.
  
  --
  An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
She never saw the computer? by infernalC · 2013-09-16 06:35 · Score: 1

That's about the silliest thing I've heard today. A television screen, even in 1984, was probably a computer monitor. Granted it was NTSC, but around that time most televisions were switched over to digital tuners (which are computers).
I mean, I'm a computer programmer, and I spend my day working in Visual Studio, vim, and NetBeans (depending on what I'm doing). By that logic, I never see a computer either, at least not the one I'm working on. I spend most of my day in an RDP session on a retired tradeshow 27" iMac. I have to touch xcode once in a while, but I mostly keep it for the real estate.
1. Re:She never saw the computer? by BasilBrush · 2013-09-16 06:47 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  That's about the silliest thing I've heard today. A television screen, even in 1984, was probably a computer monitor. Granted it was NTSC, but around that time most televisions were switched over to digital tuners (which are computers).
  Not even close. This was the UK, so the system was PAL, not NTSC. And in 1984, televisions (as this was) were fare more analogue than digital. For sure it was a TV with teletext, and a modem, so there was some digital element in there, but certainly more analogue TV than computer monitor. Teletext was very much a technology to display text on a PAL analogue TV.
2. Re:She never saw the computer? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2013-09-16 06:59 · Score: 1
  
  A television screen, even in 1984, was probably a computer monitor.
  With a hidden camera.
  
  --
  Ezekiel 23:20
3. Re:She never saw the computer? by 91degrees · 2013-09-16 07:55 · Score: 1
  
  Sounds like this was Prestel. Not quite sure exactly how that worked, but presumably the terminal device was a computer.
  
  Of course, the actual work was done by a bank of servers buried in the vaults of British Telecom somewhere. The prestel hardware would have been just a dumb terminal adaptor
4. Re:She never saw the computer? by Alioth · 2013-09-16 08:18 · Score: 1
  
  To be pedantic, it would have been a PAL television (625 vertical lines) since it was the UK. It's likely the Prestel set wasn't built into the TV, it's a lot more likely this was a set top box, but the reporter didn't know how Prestel and other Videotex services were typically used back then. The TV may have been full of vacuum tubes (we call them "valves" here).
  My first computer was connected to a TV. In the mid-late 80s, I had a modem for it - but we always had cast off TVs from TV rental places since my grandfather was a TV engineer. So my computer screen (just a standard TV) was full of valves and there was nothing remotely digital about it. It took about a minute and a half to warm up. In 1987 though I was buying games by download via Micronet 800 - which was doing much of what Steam does now except for DRM.
  
  --
  Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
5. Re:She never saw the computer? by gl4ss · 2013-09-16 08:41 · Score: 1
  
  she never saw the computer because they didn't say that the device that called the order in was a computer nor did they say that the output she saw on the screen was computer generated.
  computer monitors up until 2000's were all just as analog as tv's.. heck, more analog since the tv's that included a teletext viewer had computers(not very fancy of course) built into them(to generate the teletext view), usually the micro controlled other stuff too like what the tuner was tuned into, brightness controls and what have you.
  definitely more fancy than the piece of shit nec multisync I had for a while in the '90s.
  a tv is by definition pretty much what counts as a "computer monitor" but only with _added_ circuitry.
  why wouldn't you call a tv with teletext and a friggin modem a computer? at the very least call it a computer terminal.
  anyhow that family that's stuck in 1986 can finally order some grub without worrying if the callcenter guy at the other end understood him.
  
  --
  world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
6. Re:She never saw the computer? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-16 10:24 · Score: 1
  
  So my computer screen (just a standard TV) was full of valves
  Are you sure? The introduction of colour TV in the UK post-dates the use of transistors in consumer electronics. I'm not aware that any colour TV in the UK ever used valves.
  So you might have had a really, really old black and white TV. Or there were no valves and it was the CRT itself that took time to warm up.
7. Re:She never saw the computer? by BasilBrush · 2013-09-18 05:57 · Score: 1
  
  Are you sure? The introduction of colour TV in the UK post-dates the use of transistors in consumer electronics. I'm not aware that any colour TV in the UK ever used valves.
  Oh for sure most or all TVs of the early 1980s had valves. My brother's job at the time was a TV repair man, who's main job was visiting homes, replacing valves. Sometimes it'd be burned out boards, but mostly it was replacing valves.
8. Re:She never saw the computer? by BasilBrush · 2013-09-18 06:11 · Score: 1
  
  Anyone who was using microcomputers of the time was very aware of the difference between a TV and a computer monitor.
  Teletext it was done with logic chips. No CPU. Logic chips don't make it a computer.
  As to Prestel, mostly it was via separate boxes, that would output UHF to a TV, working exactly as if the signal was coming from a TV aerial.
The twist is ... by paxprobellum · 2013-09-16 06:42 · Score: 1

Everything is a 'computer'...
JC Penney tryed some like this back in the 80/90's by Joe_Dragon · 2013-09-16 07:01 · Score: 3, Interesting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-vctzDHAf4
Re:slow news day I guess by Russ1642 · 2013-09-16 07:04 · Score: 1

More like "The first lines drawn with sticks in the dirt by neanderthals lead directly to the Comic Sans font"
And that was 1984? by bickerdyke · 2013-09-16 07:25 · Score: 1

Some Granny managed to order groceries online and have them delivered to her place. - And that's something that Amazon and conventional supermarkets are still working on.

--
bickerdyke
1. Re:And that was 1984? by istartedi · 2013-09-16 07:51 · Score: 1
  
  They're not working on it. They're just re-inventing it. It used to be that it wasn't that uncommon for local markets to deliver, for customers that wanted to pay for delivery. This was probably even more common when there was one car per family and only the husband drove it. They're just working on a more efficient, less personal version of picking up the phone and asking Sam the Butcher if his boy can deliver some beef. Remember It's a Wonderful Life? Yeah, it's a movie; but the boy delivering drugs was probably a pretty realistic scenario. Oh, and remember milk men? So. Amazon et. al., will re-invent all of that in some newer form if the economics are there. With times being tough, we might see more one-car families and/or extended families where you have somebody at home to accept deliveries. If anything will make delivery more common, it's those kinds of demographic shifts back towards something that doesn't require everybody to be really busy away from home and/or to have their own personal auto.
  
  --
  For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
2. Re:And that was 1984? by bickerdyke · 2013-09-16 08:55 · Score: 1
  
  With times being tough, we might see more one-car families and/or extended families where you have somebody at home to accept deliveries. If anything will make delivery more common, it's those kinds of demographic shifts back towards something that doesn't require everybody to be really busy away from home and/or to have their own personal auto.
  I think that's the problem here. I'm already struggling to pick up my Amazon parcels from the post office when the post office tries to deliver them during usual office hours (named because I'm usually at the office and NOT at home...)
  
  --
  bickerdyke
3. Re:And that was 1984? by mjwalshe · 2013-09-16 09:16 · Score: 1
  
  Not in the Uk its not :-)
4. Re:And that was 1984? by Gavagai80 · 2013-09-16 11:11 · Score: 1
  
  What they're working on is making it profitable enough to bother.
  
  --
  This space intentionally left blank
Time Warner QUBE by rssrss · 2013-09-16 07:39 · Score: 2

Dates from 1977.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUBE

--
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Re:Minitel a few years older by DrXym · 2013-09-16 07:56 · Score: 1

That may be (or not) but the fact is that by the time this granny was using her pilot system in the UK, minitel was being handed like candy to pretty much any phone subscriber in France.
Grandma Snowball by GodfatherofSoul · 2013-09-16 09:26 · Score: 2

That's one google search I dare not try.

--
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Re:slow news day I guess by camperdave · 2013-09-16 09:34 · Score: 1

This story isn't even news!
I'll say. People have been shopping at home since at least a century or more. It's just that these days it's done by website rather than by catalog and postal service.

--
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Question: Did they have one-click ordering? by TwineLogic · 2013-09-16 09:50 · Score: 2

"Just curious." I mean: I hope they had prior art of every amazon patent, right down to the color orange.
Minitel? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-16 09:51 · Score: 2, Interesting

"What she - and everyone else with her [in May 1984] - didn't realise was that her simple shopping list was arguably the world's first home online shop. With her remote control she used a piece of computer technology [...]"
...that had been in use in France since 1978 (at a national scale since 1982).
Maybe that's why people "didn't realise it was the world's first home online shop". Because they'd actually bothered to check, unlike whoever wrote this article.
And yet, now by s0nicfreak · 2013-09-18 08:36 · Score: 1

groceries are probably the only thing where it is less efficient to buy online and have delivered than to go to a store.