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videotex

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Videotex

™ an information system that displays information from a distant computer on a television screen
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

videotex

[′vid·ē·ō‚teks]
(communications)
An electronic home information delivery system, either teletext or videotext.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

videotex

An obsolete electronic service offering people the privilege of paying to read the weather on their television screens instead of having somebody read it to them for free while they brush their teeth. The idea bombed everywhere it wasn't government-subsidised, because by the time videotex was practical the installed base of personal computers could hook up to time-sharing services and do the things for which videotex might have been worthwhile better and cheaper. Videotex planners badly overestimated both the appeal of getting information from a computer and the cost of local intelligence at the user's end. Like the gorilla arm effect, this has been a cautionary tale to hackers ever since. See also vannevar.
This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

videotex

The early, first attempts at interactive information delivery for shopping, banking and news. Starting in the 1970s, many trials were made, but videotex never caught on in the U.S., and it was not very successful elsewhere except in France (see Minitel). Videotex used a TV set-top box and keyboard. Data were delivered by phone line and stored in the box as predefined frames with limited graphics that were retrieved from a menu. See interactive.
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References in periodicals archive
El videotex y el teletexto no fueron una simple version electronica del periodico impreso, puesto que las informaciones y contenidos se adaptaron al soporte.
Worldwide Videotex currently publishes 30 high-technology newsletters monthly, focusing on computers, telecommunications, energy, telephony, biotechnology, and the environment.
Exploring the Role of Videotex in the International Strategy of the Firm, presented to the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, Solomons Island, MD, September 1992.
Newspapers, magazines, trade journals, authors and even college professors gushed about how the new videotex systems would change the world.
Honeywell's InfoNow Videotex System, which was introduced in April, is the result of three years of research and customer trials at its Videotex Support Center in Schiller Park, Illinois, to assess the requirements and cost justifications for business videotex systems.
In the early videotex rests there were staged photographs of the test households with well-groomed young couples attentively tapping away at their keyboards and proudly studying the news scrolling on the video screen.
But instead of becoming a "marketing edge for the new world," videotex bombed, collapsing into die-hard CompuServe and fledgling Prodigy.
Some of the important applications that are already in the process of adopting JPEG compression or have stated their interest in doing so are Adobe's PostScript language for printing systems [1], the Raster Content portion of the ISO Office Document Architecture and Interchange Format [12], the future CCITT color facsimile standard, and the European ETSI videotex standard [9].
They assumed the videotex industry would need videotex reporters.
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