Prestel

Invention and development In 1970, Samuel Fedida, a research engineer who had worked at English Electric and a US consultancy company, joined the Post Office as head of the Computer Applications Research Division. Within a year, he had completed the initial design of a viewdata system (the generic term in use at the time) for the general public: it would comprise information stored on a central computer accessed over the public phone network using modified televisions as terminals. By early 1973, the Post Office had decided to develop an experimental system, and was working with the BBC, the Independent Broadcasting Authority, and standards organisations to develop compatible standards for teletext and viewdata. During 1974, it decided to commercialise the viewdata concept. where Fedida presented a paper on the technology and the potential appeal, as the Post Office saw it, of a public interactive information service. Further demonstrations followed, and based on the favourable reactions of TV manufacturers and potential providers of information and services, the Post Office decided to run a pilot trial. The two-year pilot service began in January 1976. Interviewed by The Times, Fedida was quoted as saying that the Post Office saw viewdata playing several roles: as a "centralised information source", an "intelligent interface" to specialised scientific and technical data, a "communication machine" for passing messages, a personal information store, a new information distribution medium, a "channel for education in the home", and as providing an "advanced calculator service". the Post Office launched a test service of Prestel, as it was now called, in October 1978. At the end of December, there were 95,500 information pages, growing at a rate of 3,500 per week, and just over 300 users, increasing by 3050 per week. By February 1980, there were 131 IPs and 116 sub-IPs. The Post Office categorised the IPs as follows: national and local newspaper groups; magazine and other publishing groups; central government departments, and other agencies (such as the British Tourist Authority and the British Library); nationalised industries (including British Airways, Sealink, and British Rail), and companies in other fields of business, such as banks and travel agencies; new companies set up to exploit the viewdata medium, and those expanding from an existing base of online services, such as Reuters; associations; software companies; and miscellaneous. and the Consumers' Association. Overall, popular topics included games, quizzes, jokes, and horoscopes; the Stock Market, company information, and business news; travel and holiday information; national news, sports, and "What's On" locally; cars; and consumer advice. Writing in the winter 1980/81 issue of British Telecom Journal, Prestel's public relations manager stated there were over 7,500 sets attached to the system, 170,000 frames in use, and more than 400 IPs and sub-IPs. By the end of 1981, according to Butler Cox, a management consultancy, Prestel had 2,000 residential and 11,000 business users, with 14,000 "terminals" in use. The service was within local call reach of 62% of phone subscribers in Britain. IPs numbered 153, with 593 sub-IPs. Users accessed 190,000 frames per day, and the average time on the system, for each user per day, was 9 minutes. There were 193,000 frames available, including 2,000 response frames. Prestel Gateway March 1982 saw the launch of the Prestel Gateway service. This enabled users to connect, via the Prestel network, to external computers operated by IPs or other companies. Travel agents, for example, used Gateway to connect to tour operators' systems and make reservations. By October 1982, the online usage charge had risen to 5p per minute (8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday and also 8 am to 1 pm on Saturdays, free at other times), the business standing charge to £15 per quarter, residential users now paid £5 per quarter, and jack installation cost "from £15", with a 15p quarterly rental fee. under page *656#, Prestel's publicity department published a "Factframe" showing, at the end of each month, the average number of terminals attached and the respective percentages in businesses and in homes; the number of frames available and the number of frame accesses per week; and the number of messages sent per week. Actual subscriber figures were not published; Thomas et al. (1992) suggest these were "significantly less" than the number of terminals, as "businesses were assumed to 'attach' more than one terminal", and note that British Telecom stopped publishing figures at the end of 1988. In September 1982, The Times reported there were 18,000 users, of whom 3,000 were residential. Noting that British Telecom had originally forecast 50,000 users at this point, the report went on to outline a new approach to attracting them, quoting senior managers from British Telecom and the head of a joint venture. The plans involved the introduction of a home banking service; the marketing of a Prestel adaptor for computer terminals to the business and higher education sectors; and the launch of Micronet 800, a service for microcomputer users. Six months later, in February 1983, the same newspaper recorded 22,400 users, of whom 15% were residential, writing that the future of Prestel "could be in doubt by 1985 if it is not approaching profitability." In mid-1984, the UK Department of Trade and Industry issued a booklet stating that the availability of travel information, the launch of Micronet 800, and the provision nationwide of the messaging service, Mailbox, had contributed to a rise to 45,000 attached terminals by June of that year. 61% were in businesses, and 39% in homes. In that month, on average, the Prestel database contained 320,000 frames that were accessed 14.6 million times. 17 Prestel Gateways to external computers were in operation. For July, the Butler Cox consultancy recorded 47,000 users (60% business, 40% residential), and a total of 1,200 IPs and sub-IPs. In mid-1985, The Times stated there were 53,000 "terminals, adapted televisions, microcomputers or specially designed units" attached to Prestel, with residential users now accounting for 45% of the total. In the reporter's view, this represented "a change of fortune for [a service] deemed commercially dubious by many commentators." The figure of 65,000 was reached at the beginning of 1986about a third were Micronet 800 subscribers. Prestel had reportedly traded at a profit from the previous October onwards. Commenting in September 1986 on what it referred to as "only 70,000 users ... growing at a rate of ... a few hundred customers a week", The Times declared that Prestel "had failed to live up to expectations", comparing it unfavourably to the French Teletel videotex service and to British Telecom's own Telecom Gold electronic mail service. Earlier in the year, The Guardian had also praised Teletel, asking "Can Prestel be improved or should we just scrap it and start again?", and questioning whether a scrolling, text-based system, such as CompuServe's, was in any case preferred by most consumers over page- and graphics-orientated videotex services. Writing in The Guardian just before Christmas 1988, Jack Schofield reported that Prestel "had become reclusive" about user numbers, with the Factframe, "[a]fter prompting, ... finally updated this summer ... claim[ing] 90,000 users", while the figure of "only 75,000" was being quoted by the British Telecom manager responsible for the service. In January 1989, drawing on what turned out to be the final Factframe, published at the end of 1988, Schofield wrote that "After ten years, [Prestel] has yet to achieve the number of users it expected to get in its first year", quoting a figure of 95,460 terminals attached. Membership had decreased from a peak of around 20,000. The Times agreed, and also pointed to a steep rise in subscription charges, opining that "BT's failure to provide even this committed group with an economic ... service means that Prestel is destined ... for businesses." The closure in April 1991 of Homelink, the home banking service launched in 1983 by the Nottingham Building Society, also contributed to shrinking the number of Prestel subscribers. Closure British Telecom closed Prestel in early 1994, selling it to a consortium. It was rebranded as "New Prestel", focusing on the provision of financial data to businesses. In 1999, the financial data component of Prestel On-line was bought by the company Financial Express to become "Financial Express Prestel". The service component merged with the ISP Demon Internet, which ran a "Prestel Internet Service". This closed in 2002. Noll contrasted the "relative failure" of Prestel with the "success" of teletext, noting that receiving the latter was free and its database much smaller. This latter view was also held by Mosco, a political economist, who wrote in 1982: "[T]he British government appears to be prepared to let Prestel sink or swim on its own commercial ability ... It is too early to offer a complete assessment of Prestel. However, the direction of development is clear: the need for immediate commercial success means cutting back on earlier mass marketing efforts and an emphasis on specific business uses." In a paper published shortly after Prestel had been discontinued in 1994, Case, an information scientist, examined the motivations behind the development of this and other videotex services from a sociological perspective. In his view, "[E]xplanations of videotex require consideration of higher-level phenomena [such] as policy, ideology, belief, and vision". He identified the envisioning of videotex as a facilitator of mass participation in an emerging information societya belief held and promoted by many politicians, futurists, sociologists, and business leaders in the 1960s and 1970sas a crucial spur to the development of the technology, sustained investment, and the roll-out of services. Regarding Prestel, Case summarised the problems it faced (as described by a former chief executive) as the lack of a trigger service, low-quality information, complicated charges, competing services, and uncoordinated marketing by IPs, British Telecom, and terminal and adaptor providers. He cited the control over content exercised by IPs and the system operator, British Telecom, ==Database==

Pages and frames Numbering Information on Prestel was held in a database of "pages". Each page corresponded to a screenful of information, and had a unique number up to nine digits long. A page could have up to 26 sub-pages, with each sub-page labelled with a letter from "a" to "z". A sub-page was called a "frame": the page itself was frame "a". Neither pages nor frames could scroll. Each IP rented a three-digit number as its master page. For example, the Meteorological Office's was 209, Combined with the follow-on attribute, this provided a way to continue animations that could not fit within the number of characters available in one frame alone. This follow-on frame attribute was also used for telesoftware, enabling computer programs, such as those for the BBC Micro, to be downloaded from Prestel. When preparing and editing a page, an IP could use upper- and lower-case letters, digits, punctuation marks, a few arithmetic symbols, and a set of "mosaic characters" for composing rudimentary graphics. In early 1978, at the end of the pilot trial, Post Office Telecommunications commissioned a study of the content and function of Prestel and how these aspects related to the graphic design of Prestel pages. Several graphics designers were consulted (including the designer of Prestel's logo and its index and system pages), along with professional writers, journalists, media specialists, and database managers. On graphic design, the main conclusions reached were to encourage IPs to use only a few colours on each page; to take into account the variety of TV sets and other terminals in use (colour or monochrome, different screen sizes, a range of serif or sans-serif typefaces); and to accommodate users with poor sight or colour blindness. On writing for Prestel, the main finding of the study was to never undertake the composition and editing of content without considering the physical and technical limitations of the Prestel page and the overall structure of the information of which it formed a part. Links A page could be directly linked to up to ten other pages by specifying, during editing, the number of the page whose content would be displayed when a user pressed a digit from 0 to 9 on their keypad or keyboard. The content of pages ranged between two poles: at one, a menu listing the topics available and the number to key to reach them, with no, or minimal, further informationreferred to as an "index page"; and at the other, a screenful of information with few, if any, links to other pagesan "information page". According to Rex Winsbury, as experience with the viewdata medium grew, IPs "gave information on all or most pages, simply varying the amount according to the number of routings [links] that have to be given as well." The Post Office, academics, and the media referred to this hierarchical database arrangement as a tree structure or "inverted tree". Though simple in theory, in practice this structure could lead a user to a dead end: they might find that how a subject was described in a menu did not match what they saw on the final destination page, or formed only part of what they were looking for, or provided information without the means to look up related material. Going back through the sequence of menu choices (using the *# command) to try another series of links was limited to three steps in all. Micronet 800, an IP, visualised the relationships between its pages in a London Tube-style schematic map as part of a guide for users. From 1983 to mid-1987, The Prestel Directory, a quarterly magazine, was distributed free to all Prestel users and also available on subscription: it contained a user guide and subject index, a list of IPs and sub-IPs, feature articles, and videotex product news. This was superseded by Connexions, sent to users every two months till May 1988. A directory was also incorporated into the quarterly Prestel Business Directory published by the Financial Times from 1979. From January 1986, Prestel published Focus magazine on page 123 "to show you the most useful, entertaining and topical pages from the thousands available." It spotlighted news, sport, weather, and entertainment information on a daily basis, and included weekly features. ==Information providers==

There were two types of information provider (IP): main IPs, and sub-IPs. Charges Page rental A main IP rented pages from the Post Office (initially) or British Telecom (later), and controlled a three-digit master-page in the database. In 1982, this cost an annual £5,500 for a basic package, equivalent to around £29,000 in 2021. The basic package included 100 frames; the ability to enter and amend information, retrieve response frames, and store 10 completed response frames; staff training in editing (a two-day seminar), and a copy of the IP editing manual; and, if required, bulk update facilities and an annual print-out of frames in use. Additional frames were available, in batches of 500, for £500 a year (over £2,600 in 2021), A main IP could rent out pages at the market rate. Such IPs were known as "umbrella" IPs. Sub-IPs paid a per-minute charge for editing online: in 1982, this was 8p per minute from Monday to Friday between 8 am and 6 pm, and 8p per four-minute block at all other times Other factors to be taken into account included the traffic pattern (i.e., the expected volume and frequency of data flows), the response time required (as perceived by a user), the size of the database to be accessed, and the changeability of the information stored. In 1985, British Telecom estimated that for an IP using a typical minicomputer (such as the PDP-11) located 100 km from London and handling up to 10 users simultaneously at peak times, the one-off software set-up cost would be at least £16,000, communication costs would range from £4,280 to £5,550 a year (depending on the type of connection), and Prestel usage would cost £8,600 a year. An analysis in 1981 of the pros and cons of using an umbrella IP to publish information on Prestel concluded that if the owner of the information needed less than 500 frames, it would be cheaper to use an umbrella IP, but if over 5000, this would be more expensive than doing it themselves. In between these two figures, speed, convenience, and the need for design skills favoured using an IP, while going it alone assured confidentiality and provided more control. Editing pages , connected to a Deccafax Viewdata Terminal Model VP1 manufactured (19791994) by Decca Radio & Television. Keyboard 11 x 50 x 31 cm, terminal 42 x 45 x 45 cm, 28 kg {{ cite web Using the online editor, IPs were also able to view information about a page hidden from ordinary users, such as the time and date of its last update, whether the frame was in a Closed User Group (CUG), the price-to-view (if any), and the "frame count"the number of times the frame had been accessed. IPs and sub-IPs accessed the Edit computer using their normal ID and password, but had a separate password to access the editing facility. Bulk uploads only required the edit password and the IP's account number. ==Information and services==

Prestel's pre-launch promotional material focused on the general public: When the service launched in late 1979, Post Office Telecommunications had a hands-off approach towards managing whatever IPs placed on the system.