Videotex - Comparison To The Internet Today

Comparison To The Internet Today

Some people confuse videotex with the Internet. Although early videotex providers in the 1970s encountered many issues similar to those faced by Internet service providers 20 years later, it is important to emphasize that the two technologies evolved separately and reflect fundamentally different assumptions about how to computerize communications.

The Internet in its mature form (after 1990) is highly decentralized in that it is essentially a federation of thousands of service providers whose mutual cooperation makes everything run, more or less. Furthermore, the various hardware and software components of the Internet are designed, manufactured and supported by thousands of different companies. Thus, completing any given task on the Internet, such as retrieving a webpage, relies on the contributions of hundreds of people at a hundred or more distinct companies, each of which may have only very tenuous connections with each other.

In contrast, videotex was always highly centralized (except in the French Minitel service, also including thousands of information providers running their own servers connected to the packet switched network "TRANSPAC"). Even in videotex networks where third-party companies could post their own content and operate special services like forums, a single company usually owned and operated the underlying communications network, developed and deployed the necessary hardware and software, and billed both content providers and users for access.The exception was the transaction processing videotex system developed in the UK by Michael Aldrich in 1979, which brought teleshopping (or online shopping as it was later called) into prominence and was the idea developed later through the Internet. Aldrich's systems were based on minicomputers that could communicate with multiple mainframes. Many systems were installed in the UK including the world's first supermarket teleshopping system. Nearly all books and articles (in English) from videotex's heyday (the late 1970s and early 1980s) seem to reflect a common assumption that in any given videotex system, there would be a single company that would build and operate the network. Although this appears shortsighted in retrospect, it is important to realize that communications had been perceived as a natural monopoly for almost a century — indeed, in much of the world, telephone networks were then and still are explicitly operated as a government monopoly. The Internet as we know it today was still in its infancy in the 1970s, and was mainly operated on telephone lines owned by AT&T which were leased by ARPA. At the time, AT&T did not take seriously the threat posed by packet switching; it actually turned down the opportunity to take over ARPANET. Other computer networks at the time were not really decentralized; for example, the private network Tymnet had central control computers called supervisors which controlled each other in an automatically determined hierarchy. It would take another decade of hard work to transform the Internet from an academic toy into the basis for a modern information utility.