CAPTAIN

~ the obituary ~

CAPTAIN went on sale the year I was born. Turkey had nothing resembling it then and would not have anything resembling it for another decade, so there is no version of this story with me anywhere in it. My own first connection came in 1998 on a 14.4k modem, into a web that already existed and did not need to be invented by a phone company.

NTT announced the system in 1978 and then spent five years testing it, first on a trial that ran from 1979 to 1981 and then on a larger one from 1982 to 1983. Commercial service opened in November 1984. The name stood for Character and Pattern Telephone Access Information Network, and the whole engineering problem is sitting in the second word.

By December 1985 there were 650 information providers on the network, and the next year it reached 245 cities. The subscriber count never followed. In March 1992, seven years in, CAPTAIN had 120,000 subscribers in a country of well over a hundred million people. Minitel was serving millions of French households by then, on a terminal the phone company simply handed you.

~ the case file ~

~ why the pages were pictures ~

European videotex sent characters. Your terminal held a character generator and assembled the page locally out of the bytes the network pushed at it, which works when the alphabet is small. Japanese is not small. The kanji in common use run past 3,500 characters, and in the late 1970s a terminal that could store and draw all of them was not something you could put in a living room at a price anyone would pay.

So NTT inverted the arrangement. The page was drawn at the center and shipped to the user as an image, compressed with the same family of tricks a fax machine uses on a scanned sheet. That made the terminal cheap and the line slow, which is the opposite of the trade every other videotex system made. Sanyo built a CAPTAIN adapter for the MSX1 and Yamaha built one for the MSX2, so for a stretch the way into Japan's national online service was a home computer that mostly sold as a games machine.

~ the long tail ~

NTT closed CAPTAIN on 31 March 2002, which is remarkably late for a videotex system. By then Japan had been running i-mode for three years, and i-mode was the thing videotex had spent two decades reaching for, a walled network of paid information services billed by the carrier and sitting in millions of pockets. The country that could not make anyone want a terminal in the hallway sold them the identical proposition once it fit in a hand.

The pre-rendered page is the part that kept coming back. Whenever a device could not be trusted to hold the fonts, somebody drew the screen at the other end and shipped a picture, and CAPTAIN was doing that in production in 1984 on a phone line. It is a narrow thing to be remembered for. Most videotex systems got remembered for less.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »