Bildschirmtext (BTX)

~ the goodbye ~

btx never reached turkey, the carrier was bundespost and the terminals were sold through the german post office network, you needed a german phone line and a german account to use it. by the time i was online in late '98 the service had already been folded into the t-online brand and most german households who were going to be online were already on t-online dialup, not on the btx interface. i had no exposure to either.

bildschirmtext launched on 1 september '83 at the internationale funkausstellung in west berlin, with federal post minister christian schwarz-schilling pressing a ceremonial button and the network coming up across the bundespost phone system. the launch had been planned for years and slipped repeatedly through the early 1980s while ibm and the bundespost argued about the central server architecture. when it finally went live, it was already lagging minitel in france by three years on the same idea.

the original projection was a million subscribers by 1986. the actual number in '86 was about 60,000. the bundespost spent the late 1980s underwriting the loss and slowly improving the service, the terminal hardware got cheaper, the page format moved from cept-1 to a more flexible standard, and by '93 the brand was renamed datex-j to signal a relaunch around home users. the new name barely registered with the public, but the subscriber number did slowly climb past 500,000 by '94 and toward a million by the mid-1990s.

deutsche telekom introduced the t-online brand in '95 and bundled btx access inside the t-online dialup software, the legacy btx pages stayed reachable but the cultural centre of gravity had moved to the web. by the late 1990s the btx interface was a compatibility layer most users did not see. the last legacy services left the platform. either way, deutsche telekom switched off the last btx access at the end of '01.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch was a ceremonial moment for the bundespost. christian schwarz-schilling was a kohl-era christian democrat in charge of the telecoms ministry, the btx launch was part of his broader push to modernise the bundespost stack ahead of the eventual privatisation that produced deutsche telekom in '95. the launch ceremony made the evening news in germany. the underlying message was that the bundespost was the equal of the french telecom, that germany also had a national online network now.

the reality on the ground was thinner. the terminals were expensive, around 600 deutschmarks for a basic decoder box you connected between your tv and the phone line. the per-minute charges added up. the page catalogue was small in the first years, you could check your savings bank balance at sparkasse, you could book a deutsche bundesbahn ticket, you could read sports scores from the dpa news wire, that was about it. there was no killer app the way minitel had the white pages in france.

~ what it carried ~

by the early 1990s btx had built out a reasonable catalogue of banking and travel services. quelle and otto the two big german mail-order houses ran btx ordering pages. several banks did home banking through btx, the most-used was sparkasse with the home banking standard that later became fints. bahn timetables were on btx. lufthansa fare lookups were on btx. the german stock exchange ran a real-time market data service on btx for retail investors.

the chat side was thinner than minitel's. there were btx newsgroups and small forums but the per-minute pricing kept them small, btx never had a 3615 ulla equivalent. the german adult-content scene moved straight to the 0190 premium-rate phone lines and later to the early web, btx itself stayed mostly mainstream and corporate. that is part of why the cultural memory of btx in germany is quieter than the memory of minitel in france.

~ what it became ~

deutsche telekom introduced t-online in october '95 as a single brand covering btx, internet access, email, and a web portal. the btx pages were still reachable through the t-online client software, but new users defaulted to the web side. by '98 t-online had over a million paying subscribers, most of whom never typed a btx page number. the legacy service was running on the same servers but the editorial energy had moved.

deutsche telekom announced the btx end-of-life as part of a 2001 product cleanup. the final shutdown date was set for the end of '01 and the last legacy customers were migrated to the standard t-online dialup product. there was no big public ceremony, the way ceefax got one and minitel got one. btx slipped out quietly under the t-online umbrella, which is roughly the way most germans had stopped noticing it years earlier. the cultural memory in germany is mostly people in their fifties and sixties remembering a slow blocky banking interface on a tv set in 1991.

~ why it stayed small ~

the comparison with minitel is the obvious frame. france gave terminals away through the post office. germany sold them at retail. france set the per-minute price low and bundled the revenue share. germany set the per-minute price high enough that household budgets noticed. those two policy choices explain most of the gap between 25 million minitel users at peak and roughly one million btx users at peak, in countries of roughly the same population.

the other part is that germany had a stronger pc culture by the late 1980s than france did. west germany was a strong commodore 64 and atari st market, then a strong pc market through the 1990s. btx terminals competed with computers that could already do more. minitel terminals had no pc-equivalent in french homes at the same scale, so they faced less competition for the same kitchen table. the german btx user was always a person who could have used a pc instead, and the pricing made the pc look better.

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