By 1980, interactive services had been pioneered in Great Britain. CompuServe and The Source existed for computer users, but nearly everyone believed the television would be the display device of the future. In 1982, early interactive newspaper services were being introduced in the United States by Knight Ridder and Times Mirror. Knight Ridder was building and testing Viewtron in Miami, and Times Mirror was doing the same with Gateway in Los Angeles. Newspapers, magazines, trade journals, authors and even college professors gushed about how the new videotex systems would change the world.
Education takes place largely in front of a monitor in the student's home.
Instant electronic referenda assure wide participation in a self-governing democracy. The course, it turns out, was one of the first taught anywhere on the implications of videotex. Students were required to write research papers predicting what online systems would offer in 2000. I came across the term papers in a dusty file cabinet, and their content is fascinating. Not one of them mentions the Internet, which had been around since the late 1960s as a research network, or envisions anything like the World Wide Web, which was invented in 1990.