Viditel

~ the obituary ~

The Netherlands had a public dial-up information service running in 1980. I made my first connection in 1998, on a 14.4k modem in Turkey, and by then the Dutch had already switched the whole medium off. Viditel died in september 1989. Its replacement was gone by the first day of 1997, which means an entire national online culture opened and closed before I ever typed an AT command.

Viditel went live on 7 august 1980, launched by the PTT, the state post and telephone monopoly. It was videotex: pages of text and blocky color drawn onto a television screen, 24 lines of 40 characters each. The pages came down the phone line at 1200 baud while your side of the connection ran at 75, because all you ever sent back was a page number off a keypad. Nothing had a name. Everything had a number, and finding anything meant either knowing the number or walking down an index one screen at a time.

The audience it found was the office. By the end of 1983 there were 8,200 subscribers and around 600 organizations publishing pages onto the system. Banks and freight companies could justify the bill. Households could not.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

The price of admission killed it. Getting onto Viditel cost roughly 3,000 guilders for the modem and the equipment around it, and a purpose-built television set ran closer to 5,000. On top of the hardware you paid telephone ticks by the minute, then a separate fee per page set by whoever had published that page. Nobody could tell you in advance what an evening would cost.

France answered the identical problem by giving the terminal away. The Minitel arrived free from the phone company because the phone company wanted the printed directory off its budget, and once millions of them sat in living rooms the services came looking for the audience. The PTT sold Viditel instead of seeding it. There was a plainer problem underneath that one. Dutch television already carried Teletekst, free and looking nearly identical, so no ordinary viewer could see why the other one needed a modem and a monthly bill.

~ the actual end ~

In september 1989 the PTT stopped trying to repair Viditel and replaced it outright. Videotex Nederland presented itself on the 20th of that month with no subscription fee at all, charging by which number you dialed so an information provider could set its own price and the cost of walking in went to almost nothing. It opened with about 80,000 users, of whom roughly 30,000 came across from the public side of Viditel.

That worked for a while. Videotex Nederland was carrying around 250,000 users in early 1994, more than Viditel ever managed in nine years of trying. Then the internet arrived in Dutch homes and the usage minutes fell off a cliff. The PTT closed the service on 1 january 1997.

~ the long tail ~

The part everybody actually remembers is Girotel. From 1986 the Postbank let you do your banking through Viditel, which made the Netherlands one of the first places where an ordinary person could move money from a screen at home. Girotel outlived the medium it was born on and walked straight onto the web, and it is one reason Dutch online banking was normal earlier than in most of Europe. The service died. The habit it built did not.

viditel.nl does not resolve to anything today. A handful of hobbyists still run videotex servers you can reach with an emulator or with a real V.23 modem, so the protocol is in slightly better shape than the monopoly that sold it.

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