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How a Grandmother Pioneered a Home Shopping Revolution
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.'"
And for fucks sake PRESTEL was far more than a dumb Videotext information service.
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
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
...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
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-vctzDHAf4
Dates from 1977.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUBE
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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!
"Just curious." I mean: I hope they had prior art of every amazon patent, right down to the color orange.
"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 [...]"
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.