X*Press X*Change

~ the last words ~

X*PRESS Information Services was a partnership between McGraw-Hill and Tele-Communications Inc., which at the time was the biggest cable operator in the United States. In late 1986 the two of them started sending a live newswire up to a satellite and back down through the cable that already ran into millions of American living rooms. None of it showed up on the television. The data rode in a corner of the signal, and with the right hardware you pulled it out.

What came down that pipe was Associated Press and Reuters copy, Agence France-Presse, McGraw-Hill's own material and Standard and Poor's market data, with Kyodo and ITAR-TASS and Xinhua filling in the parts of the world the American wires ignored. Delayed stock quotes updated through the day. This was a newsroom wire feed sold to anyone who wanted one, eight years before a web browser existed.

None of it could have reached me, and price was not the reason. Turkish cable television did not start until around 1990 and no Turkish cable system ever carried data. Everything I read online came up a telephone line, starting at 14.4k and eventually reaching 56k, and the number that governed my life was how many minutes the modem stayed connected. A permanently open 9,600 bit stream that cost nothing per minute was a shape of connection I did not meet until broadband arrived at home in 2006.

~ the record ~

~ the pipe ~

The hardware was a General Instrument InfoCipher 1500P satellite modem, matched to the VideoCipher II+ receivers cable systems already had racked up. Software shipped for MS-DOS, the Macintosh, the Amiga, the Apple II and the Atari ST, and the Macintosh version had the reputation as the good one. Nine thousand six hundred bits per second was faster than any home telephone line in 1986 and it never slowed down, because the feed was one-way and had no idea how many people were reading it.

That is the economics people forget about broadcast. Adding a subscriber cost the operator nothing, so the marginal reader was free, which is the opposite of every dial-up service of the same decade where each extra customer meant another modem and another phone line. X*Press could have served a million homes off the same transponder. It never had to, and that turned out to be the problem rather than the achievement.

~ what it became ~

Sometime in the nineties the service was renamed InGenius. The rename is the tell. A product with a name like X*Press X*Change is confident about what it is, and a product called InGenius is looking for a market. By then the feed had two competitors it could not answer: on-screen cable graphics good enough to show headlines and stock tickers without a computer at all, and a web where the same wire copy sat on a page for free.

It was discontinued in 1997. The satellite technology it depended on was excellent and completely wrong, a one-way pipe built for an audience that turned out to want to click. Everything X*Press delivered in 1986 is now a browser tab that costs nothing and takes no equipment, and the part it got right, that news should arrive at your machine rather than waiting for you to fetch it, had to be reinvented by push notifications twenty years later.

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