Back in the early 1970s, Britain invented the concept of viewdata, marrying the telephone to the domestic television set to create a cheap and basic information delivery system. The then Post Office dreamed the thing up as a means of generating more traffic on its lines when they were little used in the evenings and at weekends, although British Telecommunications Plc these days hotly denies that it had any such idea – IBM Corp is not the only one that makes a practice of rewriting history. Because the system, which was finally launched as Prestel, failed almost totally in the fireside market, and the only significant user base was a business one, the travel trade, which simply meant that the system generated yet more traffic when the lines were at their busiest. A year or two later, the French government latched onto the idea, but in a typically French way, tied it to industrial policy. Instead of mobilising the home television, the French system would use a dedicated terminal, and the leading French electronics manufacturers were promised enormous orders if they could design a terminal that would be cheap enough.
Pages Rose
They duly developed a vestigial little computer with a keyboard, France Telecom gave one to every subscriber in place of the phone book – with the downside that you paid for the call every time you looked up a number where letting your fingers do the walking through the phone book was of course free. And as well as phone numbers, the system delivered a wealth of other fascinating data made available by information providers, and charged according to what they perceived the value to be. Needless to say, the most widely used section is the Pages Rose – the French use Rose where the Brits use Blue, and the Pages Rose feature X-rated material. That system is of course Minitel, which continues to go from strength to strength, while Prestel has been such an unimpressive performer that British Telecom has given up on it and let it go in a management buy-out as New Prestel Ltd. Something very similar is tipped to happen in the interactive television market: the New York Times has been polling the seers of the information age, and the consensus seems to be that the people investing heavily in developing set-top decoder boxes are wasting their money and that the terminating device for interactive television, along with all the other on-line services, be it textual and audiovisual news feeds, home shopping, video games, that come with it, will be the home personal computer, and not the television set.
Negroponte
For interactive applications, the personal computer is going to win, says veteran multimedia guru Nicholas Negroponte at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, which gets funding from both the computer and television industries. Needless to say, while Microsoft Corp is betting on both camps, it is significant that its first major joint venture in the field, the one with Tele-Communications Inc, involves delivering database material to personal computers, not television sets, over the cable company’s network. And Windows 4 will make it easier to connect a personal computer to television cables and phone lines. Intel Corp is ready with a modem that links personal computers to cable television lines and receives broadband traffic from the cable 2,000 times faster than a conventional modem over a phone line. And the people that are in the forefront of delivering video-on-demand to subscribers are not the cable television companies but the on-line information services operators such as Prodigy Services Co and America OnLine Inc, which of course deliver not to a television decoder but to the personal computer. If the forecasts are correct, the personal computer manufacturers led by Apple Computer Inc, IBM Corp and Compaq Computer Corp, and their chip suppliers, Intel Corp and Motorola Inc will be the winners, while the companies that have invested heavily in adapting television sets with decoder boxes – Silicon Graphics Inc, General Instrument Corp and Scientific Atlanta Inc – may be di
sappointed. Early set-top boxes cost between $4,000 and $5,000 a time, whereas the marginal cost of a broadband modem for a personal computer is $400, and set to fall fast as demand rises. The other advantage of the computer over the television set is that it retains all its other computing functions, so that even the most technophobic household can use it for things like typing letters – and it sits there as a computing resource that can also be used for a whole range of home automation and security applications. And in the present climate of growing lawlessness, the latter are going to become more and more important and desirable.
Spy hole
Instead of peering through a spy hole in our doors to identify a visitor, how much more attractive to be able to put his or her face up on the computer screen from a strategically installed video camera set to trigger the recorder every time it detects movement, so that a memory bank or tape loop constantly maintains recordings of anything that might conceivably be threatening outside the house or apartment. Today’s music centre typically includes a CD player, a radio tuner, a couple of audio cassette decks and a turntable: the home entertainment centre of tomorrow can be expected to be built around a personal computer and as well as all those features, replace the CD drive with a CD-ROM drive, and add perhaps 10Gb of hard disk storage to complement the video cassette recorder and the audio tape drives. And it is highly likely that, instead of being built in as it is with the television, the screen will be a separate monitor chosen by size according to the buyer’s preference and pocket. What no-one is yet quite sure about is which technology will be used in the home display of the future, one of the reasons Uncle Sam is pumping so much of his citizens’ tax dollars into research and development of flat screen display technologies.
