The father of the German Internet is Kurt Gscheidle. Never heard? In the 1970s, the SPD politician was responsible for the post of Federal Minister for Post and Telecommunications under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. It was he who presented the new postal service “Screen Text”, or BTX for short, at the 1977 International Consumer Electronics Fair in Berlin.
What Kurt Gscheidle couldn’t have known at the time: It will be six years before screen text is actually launched. With him, the West Germans get a foretaste of the forthcoming Internet boom. A teletext boom, on the other hand, only exists in the overblown dreams of post office executives. Because the Deutsche Bundespost has never been known for bringing technical innovations to the market quickly and easily. After all, it took several years before the Post’s own pebble gray dial telephone was also available in salmon red and fern green. It is therefore not surprising that screen text, the forerunner of today’s Internet, got off to a rather sluggish start.
On-screen text is based on British technology
The screen text story does not begin in Germany, but in another country, in Great Britain. Experts have been working there since 1972 on a so-called “press telephone” – PRESTEL for short. This technology officially sees the light of day in 1979 and is considered the template for later screen text in Germany.
The technology found its way to western Germany on the basis of a specialist article. Post employee Eric Dank read it at the time. He played a key role in the introduction of screen text in the Federal Republic of Germany. Incidentally, in 1995 he took over the management of T-Online, Deutsche Telekom’s online service.
On September 1, 1983, the time had finally come: the screen text – or BTX for short – opened its doors nationwide. Customer interest is – to put it mildly – cautious. The Deutsche Bundespost expects to have one million BTX customers by the mid-1980s. This mark is not reached until ten years later and only because the BTX offer is now operating under the name T-Online in the new Internet territory. From 1995, BTX was linked to the new service, including e-mail and Internet access, until the end of 2001 when screen text was finally switched off.
Also read: The history of teletext – and who actually still uses it?
The three big BTX problems
The basic, first problem: BTX is expensive. The Deutsche Bundespost senses a money printing machine in the on-screen text. A monthly basic fee of 8 Deutschmarks is added to the setup fee of 55 Deutschmarks. To call up a page on the “German Internet”, additional fees are incurred. A page view costs between 1 cent and 9.99 German marks. Instead of paying for individual pages, some providers charge a time fee. Here the costs are between 1 pfennig and 1.30 German marks per minute. Pretty awesome.
Problem number 2: Until a BTX page appears in pixelated beauty on the TV screen, the user can calmly put on a pot of coffee in the kitchen. The data transfer rate is 1200 bits per second. The pixels therefore trickle onto the screen. For comparison: Today’s transmission rates of the domestic Internet are in the megabit to gigabit range.
The third problem: As already indicated, the terms innovation and Deutsche Bundespost are in stark contrast. Some third-party providers already have a BTX interface for popular home computers, such as the Commodore C64. In the early years, however, the Bundespost did not allow any external providers of modems. This prevents technical innovation per system.
Shopping, chatting, online banking via screen text
That’s why on-screen text was doomed from the start. Products can be ordered and delivered to your home via BTX as early as the 1980s. Because all major mail order companies such as Quelle or Otto also offer their product catalogs in on-screen text. Users can also chat with each other, although the term didn’t even exist back then. You can also send messages back and forth. With a lot of imagination, this process can be compared to writing an email.
At that time, a service could actually be described as an innovation. Because banking transactions can also be done via on-screen text. Later, in the 1990s, when the Internet began its triumphal march, BTX formed the technical basis for online banking. Dialing in via screen text has long been considered the most secure access method.
That is why at some point the million mark falls among users. Apart from online banking, however, nobody has been interested in the technically outdated screen text for a long time. BTX is becoming a kind of tech zombie. Because it was only in 2007 that Deutsche Telekom, the successor to the Deutsche Bundespost, finally closed the shop.
Bizarre BTX stories
There are still finds on the internet from former BTX customers who have been billed for monthly maintenance fees by Telekom over the years. So did Günter Loescher, who dutifully paid the maintenance fee for a MultiTel between 1991 and 2010 without realizing it. How this could happen is reported by the “World“. The telecom bill landed on his accountant’s desk every month. It listed the item “Maintenance No.: 000011/0000000 from 01/28/1991” at 17.10 euros, which she never questioned. But when the accountant was on vacation and Löscher examined the bill himself, the 62-year-old company noticed the item. Over the years, Telekom deducted a total of 4,052.70 euros for a device that had long since been superfluous and had not been in use for years.