What Teletex can teach us

Through much of the 1980s, governments and corporations invested hundreds of millions of hours and dollars developing three technologies now generally considered extinct: teletex, videotext and Minitel. The technologies which now define the history of the Internet were relatively ignored, though known to exist as obscure academic experiments. Most curiously, BBSes and Fidonet – popular technologies which defined the digital world for millions –were, and remain, largely ignored by scholars. This paper quantitatively explores the scholarly output regarding four ICT paradigms extant in the 1980s, reports on their current state of development, and theoretically interrogates the institutional lessons to be learned from three failed research projects.