Dead Media Beat: American teletext

*It's quite pitiful.

Twenty million bucks from TIME WARNER

Cecilia D’Anastasio
Mar 3 2017, 5:10pm

As the history of digital media has become subsumed by the history of the internet, teletext remains largely forgotten. Yet like a fair-weather psychic, the technology anticipated things to come.

Under a side table in the elegant Upper West Side apartment of Ina Saltz, a design professor at the City College of New York, a taped-up box collected dust.

Until recently, the box belonged to the late Joel Azerrad, Saltz's former boss, who kept it in his attic. A former digital graphic designer for Time Teletext, an experimental pre-internet digital media platform that Time Inc. invested $25 million in the early 1980s, Saltz tore open the package and slowly lifted out memorabilia: 8-inch Datalife floppy discs, small translucent slides of neon pixel art, four low-res sample graphics of a boxer with red, blocky gloves. Haphazardly stacked were screenshots of pastel video game landscapes, a little psychedelic.

A paperweight-sized crystal ball rested on top of the various files and outdated storage devices. Frozen inside of it is a hand holding a remote pointed at a television. The TV screen read "TIME TELETEXT SERVICE" in turquoise block letters.

"We were inventing the future," Saltz remembered, handing me the orb. "It was like being at NASA and sending a rocket up."

TIME FOR THE FUTURE

In May 1979, the Associated Press ran an aspirational story titled "Teletext: Soon You'll Be Punching Buttons And Talking Back To Your TV." With unrestrained reverence, the journalist describes Bill Jones, an imaginary teletext user, navigating a list of Chinese restaurant menus on his TV monitor with a remote.

Pushing the left and right buttons granted Jones access to restaurants' phone numbers, addresses, and coupons, which appeared on his screen in a dated, blocky neon type. Jones picks a restaurant and soon routes back to teletext's main menu. From there, he peruses the weather report and some local headlines, all on his television monitor and from the comfort of his sofa.

"Though Jones is not a real person," the AP story read, "his actions are not necessarily those of a science-fiction movie."…