Clive Smith, a young South African émigré and MIT grad was working for a young (well, 10-year-old) technology research firm in the Boston area called "The Yankee Group." One of the technologies Smith got to research at The Yankee Group was an information-retrieval system that a lot of people thought would be the Next Big Thing. Known generically as "videotex," it was invented in England, popularized in France, and was being evaluated by companies in the United States. Smith was intrigued with its potential.

In videotex, words and pictures are transmitted between the home or office and a server over phone lines -- or possibly cable TV lines or broadcast TV wavelength. The transfer in the early videotex systems was bidirectional, which distinguished it from teletext, the one-way transmission of data to a modified TV set using the vertical blanking interval of a broadcast channel.

Originally, videotex was asynchronous, typically 75 bps from home or office to server and a blazing fast 1200 baud coming downstream. That was the state of the art in 1973, when researchers at the British Post Office invented ViewData, later genericized as videotex. (The terminology was a matter of some confusion: A book on videotex by one of its inventors refers to it consistently as "videotext" with a "t.") The Post Office marketed it under the name "Prestel," and expected people to use it as a sort of online encyclopedia.

Prestel was, ultimately, a failure. Part of the plan right from the start had been to export the technology to other countries, and that part seemed to be working. In 1981, the Prestel technology was implemented in most of the countries in Western Europe, at least for test runs.

The other part of the strategy was to attract customers to the system. Customers were a different story altogether. The terminals, basically modified TV sets, sold for four times the price of an unmodified TV set. Customers had a hard time seeing how any improvement to their television set could be worth several times the price of the set. The London Times called Prestel "a bicycle built for three climbing a hill of consumer resistance."

The French spun out their own version, but with a drastically different sales pitch. France at the time had one of the worst telephone systems in the world, with 20 percent usage. The government wanted to bring this up to 80 percent by the end of the decade, and was prepared to spend $27 billion doing it.

In 1981, they put cheap videotex terminals in a million French homes for less than it cost to print telephone books over the course of five years. Obviously, one of the services they would offer on these videotex terminals would be an electronic phone book. The system looked like it would pay for itself, and the customers didn't mind the price at all. "Minitel," as it was called, still wasn't guaranteed to be a success because people were pretty resistant to computer technology back in 1981 -- and we're talking about a culture with 20 percent telephone penetration. But the people behind Minitel didn't try to force useful information down users' throats, letting them play games and do other less-than-serious things. One use of Minitel that caught on big was anonymous chat. People talking to one another in a new way. Because it was anonymous, or because they were French, the chat was often sexual.

Today, it looks as though the French success in getting Minitel terminals into homes has slowed the adoption of computers and Internet access there. But as a means of getting the French phone system and usage up to first-world standards, it was a success.

Germany and Japan had their own videotex initiatives, too; but North America was lagging behind Europe and Japan.

Clive Smith wasn't the only industry watcher watching videotex in 1981. At the big videotex conference in Toronto in May, they were there in force. Videotex was hot. Dozens of market trials were planned to start that year by such media players as CBS, NBC, the Knight-Ridder newspapers, Time Inc. -- and AT&T. It was widely expected that videotex would catch on big and people would be accessing information and entertainment services via videotex in their homes and offices, and in mall kiosks using modified TV sets and attached keyboards and phone lines. One research group (not The Yankee Group) boldly predicted videotex would be as common as TV, cutting significantly into newspaper reading and TV viewing.

Another person observing the videotex phenomenon around this time was Bill Von Meister.

Von Meister was an entrepreneur's entrepreneur. He had already launched and then lost control of The Source, one of the first computer-based online services. Although Compuserve was the better known service, The Source was a rising star in 1981. Even as the videotex conference was going on, The Source announced that it was adding e-mail to its package of services.

Computer-based services like The Source and Compuserve got more attention in the trade press than the early tests of videotex because they were more advanced and because the readers of these publications understood their potential. But the appeal of videotex was easy to understand, too: Practically everybody already had a telephone line (well, not in France, apparently) and a TV set. Hardly anybody had a computer. What's the better target platform for your service? Von Meister weighed the videotex possibilities. One thing he thought that everyone was getting wrong in the U.S. was the target market for the service; they were all too focused on the business user. He thought that there might be an opportunity to develop a "home information utility," possibly based on videotex, supplying airline reservation info or downloadable music tracks. Perhaps he had in mind the use to which the French were putting videotex, but he didn't say so.

Within a year, Von Meister had started another new company, Control Video Corporation (CVC), to do online games as a way of getting a foot in the door to this market for information services provided to the home. He started assembling his team, and at a trade show, he hired an eager but shy kid named Steve Case.

One of the times it pays to keep a low profile is when the ax is being swung. CVC kept the online services plan and dropped the videotex idea. It also dropped a lot of money, and when Von Meister was shown the door by the investors, Case moved up.

By this time -- we're a bit south of 1984 now -- Clive Smith had moved on and attained the exalted status of vice president of corporate development for Commodore Computers. Commodore was always an international company: Incorporated in the Bahamas, it introduced its machines first in Japan or Europe, and generally had its best sales in Europe.

Commodore was riding high on the success of its Commodore 64, but had high hopes for a new machine called the Amiga that sported one of those new-fangled graphical user interfaces. Commodore had acquired the Amiga by buying its inventor, Hi-Toro -- a company founded by three dentists and led by refugees from Atari. Hi-Toro's previous claim to technological fame was a game interface device that you manipulated with your -- that you manipulated by sitting on it. Despite that, the Amiga really was a technological marvel.

This whole GUI thing was controversial back then. Xerox had not had much success with the high-priced and slow Xerox Star. The cost of radical ease of use, it seemed, was efficient coding and ease of programming, sacrificing the ability to control the machine at a low level. That was just too much to give up, many thought. Besides, the Xerox machines cost too much.

Unlike other GUI offerings, the Amiga OS was relatively tightly coded. GUI was coming, like it or not. Apple was pushing ahead to finish the Mac and other companies were trying to get a piece of the GUI pie. One of them, Geoworks, was founded in 1983 in Berkeley to do a GUI shell. These shells weren't disk operating systems; they were designed to run on top of an OS and simply provide the GUI. Right, like the first several versions of Windows. Geos, the Geoworks GUI, ran on top of various operating systems and was soon available for Wintel PCs, Apple 2GS, and the Commodore 64.

Despite firing the team that created it, Commodore managed to get the Amiga 1000 out the door, and later the more popular 2000 and 500 models. By 1988, Commodore had sold a million Amigas and sales were ramping up fast. In subsequent years the company would sell 2 million, then 4, before the bottom fell out.

But Smith's focus had turned elsewhere. His job description at Commodore allowed him to pursue one project entirely of his own devising. Thinking back to the videotex experiments, he decided that Commodore ought to develop something in the way of an online service.

Smith, like Von Meister, thought that most of the online services that companies were exploring were off the mark. Commodore was having great success putting computers in the home, both in the U.S. and in Europe. The right online service for Commodore to push, Smith thought, was that of linking people to one another. Letting them talk to one another in a new way. This led him to explore ways to link Commodore to other companies, companies that had at least part of the necessary technology. After talking to other firms, he cut a deal with Von Meisner's -- now Steve Case's -- CVC to develop a product/service called Q-link. CVC was a good match for Commodore, but Commodore was salvation for the financially troubled CVC. The deal with Commodore let CVC survive a little longer, and stave off bankruptcy by morphing itself into Quantum Computer Services. Q-link didn't work very well and the partnership fell apart, but not until it had given Quantum and Steve Case a chance to stay in the game.

Then, late in the 1980s, Smith jumped ship to join Geoworks. Commodore, with erratic performance caused by erratic management, would be dead in three years. While nine years later, GeoWorks would still be going strong. Well, still going.

But by then, Clive Smith had moved on again. Where Smith went specifically, in 1996, was to Somerville, Massachusetts, to start a company called NewDeal.

NewDeal was set up to get computing power into the hands of the people that most of the industry ignores: The 95 percent of the world that doesn't have computers, the 98 percent that's not on the Internet. NewDeal sells an operating system based on GeoWorks GeOS, plus a Microsoft Office-like suite of applications. This year, it will license the software to a computer refurbishing company that will sell rebuilt "green" PCs with monitor, modem, OS, and suite of apps for $99 to $199. Two things that Smith and NewDeal have done make this possible: First, the software runs, and reportedly runs well, on several generations of PCs, from 286 PC/ATs to Pentium IIIs. Second, pricing. I don't know what that green PC maker's license terms are, but end users can buy the NewDeal OS and apps for $70 total. That's the single-user price; volume discounts apply.

Getting the software to run on old machines was not just a matter of instruction sets and device drivers. The AT scenario is 640K RAM and a 10 or 20 MB hard disk. That's all NewDeal's software takes, and it runs acceptably within those constraints. Smith thinks he's bridging the digital divide, bringing computing power to the masses. Maybe, but he's also striking a blow for tight code in an age of bloat.

Such talk of tight code must sound fairly ironic to Bill McEwen. He's the head of Amiga Inc. and the new Amiga's operating system takes up only 5 MB compared to NewDeal's 10 or 20. (The fact that Windows will fill over half a gigabyte puts this difference in a certain perspective.)

That's the upcoming Amiga, which is a different beast from the Amiga that sold 7 million machines and won a fanatical following over the past 15 years (7 million also happens to be the number of used computers sold in 1999, a statistic that means a lot to NewDeal). There are still a few of the old machines available, but like videotex in 1981, that Amiga was always more a European than an American standard. Most of the existing inventory, less than 20,000 machines warehoused in Germany, conforms to European video formats.

Amiga's history since Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 has been, like videotex, Eurocentric and frustrating.

Commodore sold the Amiga line to a German retailer, Escom. Escom actively discouraged customers from buying Amigas, pushing its PCs instead. Despite this cautious strategy, Escom went belly-up in 1996. Enter Gateway, with promises of a new Amiga for the '90s. Enter Bill McEwen, computer salesman and Amiga user, hired by Gateway as chief Amiga evangelist.

Two years later, just last August, Gateway decided that Amiga didn't fit into its plans, and fired McEwen and most of the Amiga team. Enter a chunk of that ubiquitous investment capital. Suddenly, Bill McEwen and his new company Amiga Inc., are the owners of all that German inventory, a distribution channel, a license to key Amiga patents, and the Amiga name.

Their plan is to develop a new version of the operating system, make it usable on desktop computers, web appliances, and cell phones, then license it to hardware makers, allowing one hardware maker to market a machine under the Amiga name. So there will be a new Amiga computer, but Amiga Inc. won't build it.

The operating system is being erected on a foundation developed by a British company called the Tao Group. It won't be the Amiga OS that Amigans know and love, which could be a problem. It will run old Amiga software in old-OS emulation mode, though, possibly faster than old Amigas could run it, so that's something.

And Geoworks? Also priding itself on tight coding ("seventeen years of outstanding experience developing small foot-print operating systems"), the company is focused on software for mobile devices.

I suppose it's inevitable, if you are in the operating system business and you don't want to fight it out with Microsoft in desktop systems and your operating system is more compact than Microsoft's (a low hurdle to jump), that you would consider the mobile market. Geoworks, Amiga. NewDeal is the exception, but it's also targeting a market that it hopes is out of Microsoft's gunsights. As Steve Case learned, staying out of the spotlight can be a way to ensure that you'll stick around. Videotex is still around, although probably not because it now has a low profile. It has clearly been superseded by the Internet and the World Wide Web. You can find videotex-terminal emulation programs that let you access videotex data via the Web, and endless think pieces about "convergence" sound like reheated rhetoric from that 1981 videotex conference, and the set-top box crowd is thinking inside the same box as the videotex inventors at the British Post Office. But videotex is not exactly a hot technology.

It has spawned something new, though, just this year. The British Post Office split up a few years back, and one of the entities formed was British Telecommunications. BT apparently inherited the videotex patents. One of these was for a technique designed to get people to use their phones more.

Creative thinkers at BT have decided that the patent covering this technique gives BT ownership of hypertext linking. You may have read that BT was trying to try to collect royalties from every ISP in the United States for its claimed "invention" of the hyperlink. You may not have realized that this -- in my humble opinion laughable -- claim stems from the British Post Office's failed work on videotex back in 1976.

But failure is just a stop on the success express.

DDJ