Audio Blog Episode #14 history of Internet in Canada The Pre-Internet Era in Canada ------------------------------ Telidon (from the Greek words tele "at a distance" and idon "seeing" active from the late 1970's to 1985 Telidon was launched August 15, 1978 Telidon is a videotex service, that is a service that sends data to and from a video terminal some videotex services used cable as a transmission method, some used modems Telidon is a 2nd generation videotex service 1st generation videotex service used blocks to do graphics (e.g. UK's Prestel) while Telidon could draw lines, rectangles and polygons and flood fill these shapes To do this Telidon used NAPLPS or the North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax (pronounced nap-lips) Graphics were encoded as a series of instructions (graphics primitives) each represented by a single ASCII character Telidon's intended uses were online banking, weather reports, buying movie tickets etc there are several videotex videos on youtube some of which show Telidon in action used via Cable TV connection powered by Gould SEL Mainframe one of the terminals used was the Electrohome Telidon 750 the Telidon 750 had this large keypad connected by a coiled cable similar to a cord on a telephone. Not ideal for touch typing! Electrohome, Norpak and Microtel all made terminals with a cost from $1,800 and $2,500 we can compare this to the initial price of a c64 or an XT Clone with peripherals Telidon dies March 31st, 1985 Reasons for the downfall of Telidon: the Telidon industry was reluctant to port software to commodity equipment. There was too much money to be made forcing people to buy proprietary hardware/software bundles. NABU network appears in 1982 and runs until 1985 NABU stands for "Natural Access to Bidirectional Utilities" Ottawa Cablevision launches the NABU network in October 1983 this is followed by Ottawa's Skyline Cablevision also launches the NABU network in 1984 the NABU network PC is an improvement over the traditional Telidon system NABU Network subscribers could rent or buy a NABU PC and dedicated network adaptor, and use an ordinary television set as a display monitor. the NABU terminals were complete home computers in their own right, using the Zilog Z80 CPU and running a clone of CP/M the Nabu Network PC cost $950 CAD and the network service cost about $10 per month The data transfer rate was a very fast 6.4 megabytes per second (if true, that is much faster than my current DSL, maxes out at 500k per second) In 2005 the NABU Network Reconstruction Project starts up In 2007 York University completes a functional (but minimal) system which, with high degree of accuracy preserves the functionality and appearance of the NABU Network. ------------------------------------------------------- various other videotex services include: Videotron's (Quebec Canada) UBI died Dec 31, 1997 Universality Bidirectionality Interactive Bildschirmtext BTX (Germany) launched in 1983, died 2001 Prestel (UK) becomes Prestel Online and is absorbed into an ISP in 2002 The Prestel system never was exported to Canada or the United States has there were significant differences in TV technology (UK used the PAL standard and Canada and the US used NTSC) Minitel (France) ended june 30, 2012 DATAPAC was Canada's packet switched X.25-equivalent data network which was used for debit card transactions and some ATM's used the DATAPAC network Bell phased out support for DATAPAC, discontinuing the service at the end of 2009 Videotron (USA) via AT&T Viewtron was an online service offered by Knight-Ridder and AT&T from 1983 to 1986 also Bell Canada offered Alextel terminals to customers up until 1994 which also used NAPLPS Alextel terminals used modems connected to regular telephone lines there were consumer videotex terminals, Radio Shack sold a single-purpose predecessor to the TRS-80 Color Computer and later on sold videtex software for the colour computer ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1985 All Canadian Universities are now connected to a shared network known as NetNorth. Canada Remote Systems using PCBoard running on MSDOS appears Beginning of the Internet Era in Canada --------------------------------------- 1988 Canada joins NSFNET, an international backbone of computing centres that enables more network connections early on the only way to get internet in Canada was via 3 regional networks ONet (Ontario Net) BCNet and RISQ (Quebec regional network) these networks connected to the American NSFNet Up until 1989 you had to be part of an academic or research instituiton to access the internet in Canada after 1990 Free-nets start to appear, beginning with Ottawa Ontario and Victoria BC this is followed by Toronto, Montreal, etc In 1992 Canada Remote Systems becomes CRS Online and could send emails to a Usenet Gateway by 1994 each province and territory had a regional network: all connected to form CA*net: CA*net eventually becomes CANARIE Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education Headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario http://www.canarie.ca Government of Canada recently invested $62 million dollars in canarie October 1994 Netscape releases the beta version of the world's first commercially available web browser - Mozilla 0.96b. Major US communication services such as Delphi and BIX offer full internet access wth local telephone numbers in major Canadian cities Delphi was an ascii text based service Domain of the Cube web page appears Jan 1996 In the summer of 1996 I switched over from CRS Online to Durham Internet Services (DIS) Free-nets currently existing in Canada: National Capital Free-net in Ottawa Toronto Free-Net Edmonton Free-Net Montreal Free-Net (TELNET libertel.montreal.qc.ca) English Wikipedia appears in 2001