Videotex

Teletext sent information one-way—broadcast stations transmitted pages that viewers could select but not respond to. Videotex added the missing return channel: users could send requests back to central servers over telephone lines, receive customized information, and even conduct transactions. It was, in essence, an early vision of the interactive web—but constrained by 1970s technology and state telecommunications monopolies.

The British Post Office developed Prestel, launching in 1979 as the world's first public videotex system. Users connected television-like terminals (or adapted TVs) via modems to access databases of news, weather, travel information, and shopping. France's Minitel, launched in 1982, achieved far greater success by distributing free terminals to telephone subscribers and replacing paper phone directories with electronic lookup. By the mid-1990s, over 9 million Minitel terminals were in French homes, handling 25 million monthly connections for banking, train reservations, mail-order shopping, and the notorious 'messageries roses' (chat services).

The adjacent possible had assembled unevenly across countries. All had telephone infrastructure, but adoption depended on industrial policy. France's state-owned PTT subsidized terminal distribution; Britain's privatizing telecom sector charged market rates that suppressed demand. Germany's Bildschirmtext never achieved critical mass. The technology worked—but the economics and policies determined success.

Videotex systems pioneered concepts that would later seem novel when the web arrived: online shopping, electronic banking, news on demand, and instant messaging. Minitel users could book train tickets in 1983, a decade before the web existed. But the systems were national, proprietary, and controlled by telecom monopolies. When the open, global, decentralized World Wide Web emerged in the 1990s, it offered everything videotex could do without the per-minute charges and terminal lock-in.

France finally shut down Minitel in 2012, thirty years after launch. The system represented a path not taken—an alternate future where interactive information services developed through state-controlled networks rather than open internet protocols. Its commercial services demonstrated genuine consumer demand for online transactions; its limitations illustrated why open standards and competition eventually prevailed. Videotex was the future that almost was, superseded by a more adaptable evolution.