PRESTEL

PRESTEL ( portmanteau word of "press telephone" ), name of a previous screen text service of the General Post Office, the postal administration of the United Kingdom, in addition to the French Minitel one of the foundations for the development of the service videotex ( Minitel ), the German Federal Post Office was. PRESTEL was an interactive over standard phone lines delivered and displayed on a television screen information system.

Idea trigger for the German screen text

Eric Thanks, was developed under his direction the German Ministry of Post, the screen text service, in 1975 only attention by a specialist publication on Samuel Fedida and PRESTEL on the technology. There was initially a collaboration with the British Post Office, while creating the technology and the legal basis for BTX. On August 25, 1977 BTX was first introduced by Eric Thank you and the then Federal Minister of Post and Telecommunications Kurt Gscheidle the German press at the International radio exhibition Berlin ( IFA) as a project.

Development and market launch in the UK

From 1972 was approved by the Development Authority of the British Post Office, under the direction of engineer Samuel Fedida the system ViewData developed could be transferred with the aid of a telephone line data of a mainframe computer on the TV screen.

Under the name PRESTEL the service was officially launched in 1979 by the British Post Office. The sides PRESTEL standards were similar to the teletext pages still in use today with a line graphic of colored ASCII characters ( " square graphics ").

Technology and content

A modified television screen was used to display a non- scrolling window with 40x24 text using simple ASCII graphics, according to the CEPT1 standard by 1981. PRESTEL offered in 1980 an extensive range of information, both from the PRESTEL department of the British Post Office as well as third-party and by government and parliament. The data were in a London -based centralized update computer ( called Duke) entered and then mirrored on different satellites servers across the country distributed, which also literary and cultural names were given (eg Dryden, Kipling, Derwent, Enterprise, Dickens, Keats, Bronte, Eliot and Austen ).

Limited success and transition to the Internet

Because of the cost of acquisition and the sometimes high costs for releases some content per side PRESTEL could never enforce widespread. It is not even reached the modest success of videotex in Germany and had at no time more than 90,000 users.

In 1990, when PRESTEL was already gone on the now separated and privatized by the British postal authority British Telecom ( BT), the end of the actual PRESTEL began system than BT decided to make no more content is available, but only telecommunicative infrastructure.

With the growing popularity of the Internet and recent applications of PRESTEL in closed user groups, primarily for economic data and the like were set step by step.

PRESTEL patenting and licensing fees for hyperlinks on the Internet

View Data and PRESTEL were registered in 1975 by the British Post Office in the United Kingdom as a patent, which is therefore now expired. Litigation, there was but the corresponding U.S. patents. In the U.S., the patent has not been granted the first request because Samuel Fedida had forgotten to stamp the patent application is sufficient. 1980, the application was filed, however, for the second time and ultimately issued in 1989. Then, among other things, 2000 was based a lawsuit filed by BT in the United States, with which they demanded of all licenses for hyperlinks on the Web. The suit was dismissed in the U.S. in 2002.