The 1970s system that brought text to British TVs

A closer look

Long before dial-up tones haunted our nightmares, the UK government thought they had perfected the internet. The Viewdata system was a ludicrously expensive 1970s service that let you connect your television to a phone line to slowly download pixelated text. It was billed as a revolution in human communication, but consumers ultimately paid exorbitant per-minute fees just to read bad weather forecasts and play incredibly depressing text-based trivia.