Captain (videotex)
Encyclopedia
The Captain system was a Japan
ese videotex
system created by NTT
. Announced in 1978, it was trialled from 1979 to 1981, with a second larger trial held from 1982 to 1983. The service launched commercially in 1983. It was closed on March 31, 2002.
Captain differed from comparable European videotex systems by not being based on the transmission of alphanumeric characters. The Japanese kanji
character set has over 3,500 characters, and in the late 1970s to try to include a character generator in the user's terminal that could retain and then generate so many characters on demand was seen as prohibitive. Instead pages were therefore substantially sent to the end user as pre-rendered images, using coding strategies similar to facsimile machines.
By December 1985 Captain had 650 information providers, and the next year was rolled out to 245 cities. However, by March 1992 the system still only had 120,000 subscribers. Like other videotex systems worldwide (with the exception of the French Minitel
), it never broke though to achieve mass-market usage.
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
ese videotex
Videotex
Videotex was one of the earliest implementations of an "end-user information system". From the late 1970s to mid-1980s, it was used to deliver information to a user in computer-like format, typically to be displayed on a television.In a strict definition, videotex refers to systems that provide...
system created by NTT
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
, commonly known as NTT, is a Japanese telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Ranked the 31st in Fortune Global 500, NTT is the largest telecommunications company in Asia, and the second-largest in the world in terms of revenue....
. Announced in 1978, it was trialled from 1979 to 1981, with a second larger trial held from 1982 to 1983. The service launched commercially in 1983. It was closed on March 31, 2002.
Captain differed from comparable European videotex systems by not being based on the transmission of alphanumeric characters. The Japanese kanji
Kanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
character set has over 3,500 characters, and in the late 1970s to try to include a character generator in the user's terminal that could retain and then generate so many characters on demand was seen as prohibitive. Instead pages were therefore substantially sent to the end user as pre-rendered images, using coding strategies similar to facsimile machines.
By December 1985 Captain had 650 information providers, and the next year was rolled out to 245 cities. However, by March 1992 the system still only had 120,000 subscribers. Like other videotex systems worldwide (with the exception of the French Minitel
Minitel
The Minitel is a Videotex online service accessible through the telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. It was launched in France in 1982 by the PTT...
), it never broke though to achieve mass-market usage.