The Forgotten History of a Pre-Internet Digital Media Channel

Under a side table in the elegant Upper West Side apartment of Ina Saltz, a design professor at the City College of New York, a taped-up box collected dust.

Until recently, the box belonged to the late Joel Azerrad, Saltz's former boss, who kept it in his attic. A former digital graphic designer for Time Teletext, an experimental pre-internet digital media platform that Time Inc. invested $25 million in the early 1980s, Saltz tore open the package and slowly lifted out memorabilia: 8-inch Datalife floppy discs, small translucent slides of neon pixel art, four low-res sample graphics of a boxer with red, blocky gloves. Haphazardly stacked were screenshots of pastel video game landscapes, a little psychedelic.

A paperweight-sized crystal ball rested on top of the various files and outdated storage devices. Frozen inside of it is a hand holding a remote pointed at a television. The TV screen read "TIME TELETEXT SERVICE" in turquoise block letters.

"We were inventing the future," Saltz remembered, handing me the orb. "It was like being at NASA and sending a rocket up."

In May 1979, the Associated Press ran an aspirational story titled "Teletext: Soon You'll Be Punching Buttons And Talking Back To Your TV." With unrestrained reverence, the journalist describes Bill Jones, an imaginary teletext user, navigating a list of Chinese restaurant menus on his TV monitor with a remote.

Pushing the left and right buttons granted Jones access to restaurants' phone numbers, addresses, and coupons, which appeared on his screen in a dated, blocky neon type. Jones picks a restaurant and soon routes back to teletext's main menu. From there, he peruses the weather report and some local headlines, all on his television monitor and from the comfort of his sofa.

"Though Jones is not a real person," the AP story read, "his actions are not necessarily those of a science-fiction movie."

Teletext, an information service for transmitting text and graphics to a television set, was, 30 years ago, slated to revolutionize information retrieval. Back then, when the average media consumer couldn't envision reading script on a screen, well-moneyed news services were exploring teletext as an ultramodern avenue for on-demand, 24/7 news delivery to living rooms across the globe.

Immediate access to stock quotes and international headlines was a sci-fi caprice that has today become a law of nature. Absentminded Yelping and indifferent glances at  New York Timespush notifications may now be taken-for-granted byproducts of the digital revolution. But in 1974, this user-to-information proximity was practically unfathomable, an anomaly seven years before IBM introduced its Personal Computer, the first computer of a size and price that was attractive for individual use.

Teletext, according to those who worked with it, struck technologists and journalists alike as a diviner of the tech utopia to come.

By the early 80s, the BBC, CBS, PBS, NBC, and Time Inc., through its newly-acquired Home Box Office (HBO), had all put out feelers to TV manufacturers and broadcasters investigating teletext's viability as a commercial product—with Time's investment far exceeding its peers'. Teletext's potential to accelerate the flow of information proved to be widely seductive, if not ultimately unfulfilled. Between 1981 and 1983, Time Inc. spent $25 million on its teletext experiment, hoping to facilitate around-the-clock news headlines, as well as full-blown video games on TVs across the country. In less time than it took IBM to develop its PC, the short-lived Time Teletext operation deteriorated into less than its contingent parts.

More stubborn, the BBC's teletext service went offline at 23:32:19 BST on October 23, 2012, after a 38-year run; though, like Time's, nearly every other teletext service faded into obscurity decades before with varying degrees of financial loss to hopeful media companies.

Read the rest at Motherboard.