AT&T Sceptre

~ the eulogy ~

The Sceptre was the piece of hardware you had to buy before American videotex would work in your house. AT&T announced it in July 1983 and it went on sale that October, aimed at the two largest deployments the country produced: Knight Ridder's Viewtron in Florida and the Los Angeles Times' Gateway in Southern California. It drew NAPLPS pages, which are screens described as geometry and assembled at your end, onto an ordinary television set.

Inside was an Intel 8088, the same processor as the original IBM PC, with 127K of ROM and 48K of RAM behind display circuitry built on a 6845 controller. That gave sixteen colors chosen from a palette of 256, better than most home computers of the moment could manage. It came with a battery-powered infrared keyboard and a 1200/75 baud modem already in the case. What it did not come with was any way to run a program of your own.

The price is where the story is. Six hundred dollars was the introductory number against a list price of $900, and the figure that circulated at the time was $1,200 to manufacture each unit. In May 1984 Viewtron tried bundling the terminal and the subscription together for $39.95 a month. Take-up stayed thin, and in May 1985 Viewtron gave in and opened the service to ordinary microcomputers. Ten months after that both services closed, having burned somewhere near $80 million between them.

~ the dossier ~

~ the arithmetic of the box ~

Selling a device below its build cost to seed a subscription is an old move and it was already understood in 1983. The part that gets skipped is the condition attached: it only works if the service on the other end is worth the trip. Viewtron was slow, the pages cost money to read on top of the subscription, and the information on them was not compelling enough to make a household rearrange its television.

So AT&T absorbed the loss on the hardware and got no volume in return. Specifying one terminal did buy the services something real, a single graphics standard to design every page against, with no worrying about which machine was on the other end. That is the trade: certainty at the top of the stack, paid for by putting a $900 obstacle in front of every possible subscriber.

~ what it could not do ~

The Sceptre arrived in the same years the general-purpose home computer was winning. A Commodore or an Apple could run videotex software one evening and a spreadsheet the next, and it cost about the same. The dedicated terminal had one job, and its owner had no fallback when that job turned out to be dull.

Viewtron opening to microcomputers in May 1985 was the concession, made too late to matter. Keyfax, the third NAPLPS service, ran out of Chicago with a Honeywell and Synertek terminal at $750 dropping to $350, and it also let people use their own machines. Keyfax closed in May 1986, two months behind the other two.

~ the next chapter ~

NAPLPS itself outlived the box. Prodigy took the same graphics standard and launched on it in 1988, with one difference that decided everything: Prodigy shipped software for computers people already owned and never asked anyone to buy a terminal. It ran for more than a decade.

My own first connection was 1998, a modem inside a machine that already did half a dozen other things, and the phone company had no opinion about which screen I looked at. No Turkish household I know of was ever offered a single-purpose box for going online, because by the time the option existed here the general-purpose computer had already won that argument somewhere else. The Sceptre is what the losing side looked like.

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