Alex

~ the obituary ~

The thing that separates Alex from what I grew up with is where the meter sat. When I got a modem in 1998 the phone company charged for the call and the ISP charged a monthly fee, and once you were connected nobody was counting what you looked at. Alex counted. Every minute inside the service had a price on it set by the same company that owned the wire, and the price went up depending on which part of the service you were in.

Bell Canada launched it in Montreal on 5 December 1988 and took it to Toronto in 1990. The model was copied openly from Minitel, which by then had been handing free terminals to French households for most of a decade and had made videotex look like a solved problem. Northern Telecom built the Canadian version of the terminal, the Alextel, a screen and keyboard with a 1200 bit/s modem inside, and Bell rented it out at $7.95 a month. Traffic went over Datapac, the national X.25 network, using the NAPLPS graphics standard that had come out of Telidon.

On paper it was an information utility. Electronic white pages, yellow pages, banking, news, transit schedules. In practice the popular part was the part nobody in the planning documents had led with, and it was also the most expensive part, and those two facts are the whole history of the service compressed into one sentence.

~ the case file ~

~ what people actually did on it ~

The chat rooms. Minitel had learned the same lesson a few years earlier with its own messageries, and Canada rediscovered it immediately: give people a terminal wired to other people and the directory lookups become a rounding error. Alex charged up to thirty cents a minute for chat, which works out to something like forty dollars an hour for typing at strangers over a 1200 baud link.

People paid it anyway. One subscriber ran up bills over two thousand Canadian dollars in a month, and stories like that were common enough to become the thing the press wrote about whenever Alex came up. There is no version of this where the customer is being irrational. The service was the only one of its kind on that wire, and the alternative was not a cheaper chat room, it was no chat room.

~ the terminal ~

The Alextel is a genuinely handsome object and museums in Canada still keep them, which is more than most of this era gets. It was a dedicated appliance for one service, built the way a telephone is built, on the assumption that a household would keep it for years. In 1991 Bell released software that let an ordinary IBM PC dial in instead, which is the moment the appliance stopped being the point and started being a liability.

~ how it ended ~

Bell filed with the CRTC on 30 December 1993 to de-tariff the service and got approval on 18 April. Alex went off effective 3 June 1994. The closure notice is unusually candid for a phone company, saying the network was not the right vehicle nor the appropriate technology to deliver what people needed. Translated: the web existed now, Mosaic had been out for a year, and no one was going to keep paying by the minute for a walled garden with a rented screen attached.

Minitel survived this for another eighteen years because France had built a whole economy on top of it. Alex had 32,000 members and a recession, so it got five and a half years and a closure notice. What both of them proved is the same thing, which is that the killer application was always other people, and that the companies selling directory access kept being surprised by it.

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