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Comment by peanut_worm | Hacker News Reader

I am too young to have lived while teletext was a thing. I had no idea there was something like the internet before the internet.

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There were lots of things like the Internet (in this sense) before the Internet. Go look at Genie, Prodigy, America Online, the Well, BBS systems, and many more. All centralized systems that were displaced by the decentralized Internet, which has since become much more centralized.

Obligatory mention of [1] Minitel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

People have been repurposing Minitels with some resistors and a wire to create "cheap" vt100 compatible terminals.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/from-trash-to-t...

1967: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Editing_System was internet in some sense, too, even though it was centralized and, one might say, not even ‘net’, let alone internet.

A year later, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Retrieval_and_Editing_Sys... got a bit more ‘net’ (https://www.brown.edu/news/2016-05-23/hypertext has a movie about it that is worth watching but unfortunately doesn’t show how it worked). At least, it supported multiple terminal types. That page also claims “FRESS still runs on the current Brown mainframe.” Iet would be amazing if that were true. Software that’s over 50 years old.

Not sure how old you are, but at least here in Norway, people still use it. Though I myself haven't used it in probably 15 years.

Pr. Wikipedia, in 2015 9% of the Norwegian population used teletext. In 2017, that number had reduced to 7.5% - I suspect those are mostly old folks.

But to be fair, it was incredibly handy to look up specific things fast. If you wanted sports / betting results, TV-program, currencies, or whatever, you probably had memorized the page number.

(The Norwegian Teletext, or "Text TV" as it's called here: https://www.nrk.no/tekst-tv/100/)

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