Telidon (from the Greek words τῆλε, tele "at a distance" and ἰδών, idon "seeing") was a videotex/teletext service developed by the Canadian Communications Research Centre (CRC) during the late 1970s and supported by commercial enterprises led by Infomart in the early 1980s.
With additional features added by AT&T Corporation, and 16 other contributors in North America and supported by the Federal Government, Telidon was redefined as a protocol and became the NAPLPS standard.
[1] A number of Telidon systems were rolled out, including GRASSROOTS for the Province of Manitoba, SOI for Venezuela, Compuserve, LA Times in California, EPIC for General Motors, NOVATEX for Teleglobe Canada and the Swiss PTT nationwide application.
Comments to the effect that "Within the next few decades, people may be able to access much of the published information in the world from their living rooms by using videotex,"[4] were common in the trade press.
The CRC was able to interest the Department of Communications (DoC), their superiors within the federal government, to fund development of their system into the basis for a videotex service.
[3] On 15 August 1978, the DoC (whose technical side is now part of the Industry Canada) held a press conference and formally announced the Telidon project to the public, demonstrating a large video display sending information to a minicomputer over an acoustic coupler modem.
[3] In 1979 the DoC formed the Canadian Videotex Consultative Committee to advise the Minister on ways to commercialize the CRC's work, and develop videotext services within Canada.
The committee held four meetings during the initial four-year development plan, and coordinated a number of field trials with broadcasters, telephone companies, cable television firms, manufacturers and various information providers.
Excitement was high; the 19 November 1981 issue of The Globe and Mail quoted a representative at the Canadian Computer Show and Conference in Toronto claiming that "Telidon may become as commonly used as the telephone and will have just as great a social impact."
[5]In a radio broadcast in 1980, Douglas Parkhill, the deputy minister of research at the DoC outlined some of the potential uses, from financial information, to theatre reservations, with the ability to pay and print out tickets from the system.
[6] The release of Norpac's Telidon terminal led to announcements by broadcasters and news organizations who would be rolling out test systems starting late that year.
A major foreign sale was made in July 1980 to the government of Venezuela, who set up a test system to provide information on health, social and economic aid programs to people moving into Caracas from rural areas.
The resulting system emerged in early 1983 as NAPLPS, while the transmission method that encoded information into the vertical blank interrupt of a TV signal became the NABTS standard.
Major articles in Byte Magazine introduced the NAPLPS system to a wider audience, spread over a four-month period in the February, March, April, and May 1983 issues.
[14] A significant showcase for the Telidon system was set up for the Third General Assembly of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, hosted in Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island in July 1983.
Transport Canada ran a system called "TABS" that installed terminals in many airports, where pilots could quickly look up weather information and NOTAMs.
[15] Statistics Canada also used Telidon as a way to distribute graphs and other information in their CANSIM system using their TELICHART software that converted tables of data into NAPLPS commands.
[18] Run by London, Ontario's Cableshare, the system relied on an 8085-based microcomputer which drove several NAPLPS terminals fitted with touch screens, all communicating via Datapac to a back-end database.
As it operated over modems in a pure videotex format, it was able to offer a variety of two-way services including e-mail and bulletin boards.
Test deployments demonstrated the problems that most other teletext systems also discovered: without an enormous amount of content, viewer interest is difficult to maintain.
"[24] Most teletext systems, Telidon included, were created in the context of the broadcast model, where the content would be provided by large vendors and then pushed one-way to the user in a fashion similar to television or newspapers.
Since much of the content in question was already available on different media controlled by the same companies, teletext services also had the problem of competing with incumbent mediums that were less expensive and better developed.
During the development period the hardware manufacturers felt that demand would drive down prices to less than $600, however, results from trials indicated that even this would be considered too expensive for the mass market.
One reason was the issue of continued funding which the Government hoped would come from private publishing companies such as The Globe and Mail, or The Toronto Star as most likely candidates.
[28] The government's funding of the Telidon efforts came to an official end on 31 March 1985,[3] at which point $69 million had been spent not counting the revenue expended by Infomart who had made national and international sales in excess of $20M.
[31] Rather than the failure of Telidon as a promising technology or efforts made, Telidon's seemingly slow international acceptance and North America's sluggishness in pushing it to higher level of functionality was a topic of considerable discussion and disappointment in Canada, part of a similar and wider conversation on the entire concept of videotex that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In the time between efforts like Viewtron and the launch of Prodigy in 1988, personal computers with the ability to view NAPLPS graphics with ease had become common, and modem speeds had increased to the point where the data was no longer overwhelming.
After a promising start, Prodigy management invoked a series of blunders that seriously upset their customer base, and the arrival of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s killed it off.