Tuesday, August 23, 2005
It only took 24 years
So I tune into Canada AM this morning (I usually watch my colleagues at Newsworld Morning). Up comes a commercial from Sears Canada which promotes the new Sears catalogue on CD.
That brought back memories. Twenty-four years ago there was something that would later be called New Media. In those days the idea was that data would be transmitted from a mainframe to a TV set. That was called videotex. Or on one of the black bars at the bottom of the TV picture (the vertical blanking interval). That was called teletext and it still exists as a minor outlet in the UK.
My first job in videotext was in the London. I came back to Canada and went to work for Southam's Infomart project(is now an online library service). The problem with the project (apart from the fact there was no way the public could see it) was that it was run by bunch of ex-hardware jocks, most from IBM, and fast-talking salesmen. One of those salesman convinced Sears to put the catalogue on the videotext system and create a sort of online ordering system. That was the main source of income for the project. Didn't last long. Can you imagine a catalogue with 1981-82 vintage computer graphics?
Oh yeah, about the time the Informart project got into financial trouble, the CBC started its own teletext experiment, Project Iris. That lasted from 1982 to 1984 when it was killed in the first round of Mulroney cutbacks.
It wasn't just the CBC trying it out. NBC, by coincidence, which never got off the ground, killed their project the same day as the CBC. CBS kept their's going for another couple of months. By the fall of 1984, the only people in North America watching were the CBC test homes in Toronto (200) and Buffalo (about 20 if I remember.)
8:06 AM posted by Robin Rowland
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That brought back memories. Twenty-four years ago there was something that would later be called New Media. In those days the idea was that data would be transmitted from a mainframe to a TV set. That was called videotex. Or on one of the black bars at the bottom of the TV picture (the vertical blanking interval). That was called teletext and it still exists as a minor outlet in the UK.
My first job in videotext was in the London. I came back to Canada and went to work for Southam's Infomart project(is now an online library service). The problem with the project (apart from the fact there was no way the public could see it) was that it was run by bunch of ex-hardware jocks, most from IBM, and fast-talking salesmen. One of those salesman convinced Sears to put the catalogue on the videotext system and create a sort of online ordering system. That was the main source of income for the project. Didn't last long. Can you imagine a catalogue with 1981-82 vintage computer graphics?
Oh yeah, about the time the Informart project got into financial trouble, the CBC started its own teletext experiment, Project Iris. That lasted from 1982 to 1984 when it was killed in the first round of Mulroney cutbacks.
It wasn't just the CBC trying it out. NBC, by coincidence, which never got off the ground, killed their project the same day as the CBC. CBS kept their's going for another couple of months. By the fall of 1984, the only people in North America watching were the CBC test homes in Toronto (200) and Buffalo (about 20 if I remember.)
8:06 AM posted by Robin Rowland
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