BPN 1675: 2014: already a memorable year

The new year has only just begun. Yet, for me 2014 is already a year to remember. It is 20 years since the Internet for consumers made ​​her entry in the Netherlands. On January 15, 1994 the ISP launched The Digital City ( DDS ) in Amsterdam.

The Digital City ( DDS ) started on Saturday January 15, 1994 with an television interview in the eight o'clock news. DDS was an internet project, intended as a discussion forum in the run up to the municipal elections of March 1994. The project was designed by netactivisten (Hack -Tic), the municipality and partly inspired by Marleen Stikker, the virtual mayor of the city. The town was based on community networks ( free nets) in the U.S. and Canada. The model of the city was chosen as a metaphor.

First DDS interface text without graphics (DDS Archief)

DDS Interface 3.0 DDS Archief)

 

DDS was a great success. In six weeks, 10,000 people applied for access to the city. By visiting the virtual mayor of organizations, but also to institutions, the project received much local attention, as the mayor visited organisations and institutions. And it were not only people coming from Amsterdam, but also people from across the Netherlands. After the project DDS went on as an Internet service provider. DDS actually opened the doors for Internet consumers by January 1994 and by January 1, 1997 the Netherlands  had registered 1 million internet consumers.

The success of DDS was surprising. There used to be an online and multimedia industry in the Netherlands. Online databases such as Kluwer Legal Database were used for scientific, technical and business research. Electronic messaging services like Memocom were separate, mainly business services. For consumers, there was the information service Viditel, followed by Videotex Netherlands. And for amateurs, there were the Bulletin Board Systems ( BBS ). Furthermore, there was there a beginning of a multimedia industry with text CD-ROMs, multimedia CD- ROMs and CD -i titles as well as a few electronic books. But this industry was only 100 million guilders ( 45 million euros) great in revenues and the consumer share was very low.

Internet, however, developed separately from this industry, mainly through the academic network SURF. As of 1990 there were ISPs and by the end of 1993 there were approximately 295 companies connected to the Internet. In May 1993, XS4ALL opened an Internet service to consumers. Although in the first two days, 500 consumers were registered, the number of subscribers grew slowly. DDS, however, was the driver and was a resounding success.

In retrospect, a number of factors accounted for this consumer success.

a. The number of households with a PC in the Netherlands had increased from 7 percent in 1985 to 34 percent in 1994.
b. People wanted to do more with the PC than gaming, word processing, accounting and consult encyclopedias on CD - ROM.
c. Internet came as a disruptive technology. Existing online and multimedia technologies had to adapt or eventually disappeared, eg videotex and CD-i. Out of the concrete mixer containing different technologies, eventually only Internet and email survived. Teletext and CD - OM stayed on, but played no important part anymore.

 

 d. Consumer internet was cheap compared to online databases. Moreover, the Internet technology was user-friendly thanks to hypertext, had more graphic opportunity and had greater potency multimedia ( text, image, video and sound). Besides, Internet combined with email.

e. Internet did not developed within the existing online and multimedia industry, but within the bosom of universities and scientific institutions. Companies that had internet installed proved attractive to students after completion of their academic studies.

For those interested, Reinder Rustema wrote a doctoral thesis on the Digital City in 2001.

BPN 1641: The Switch to Internet in The Netherlands (2)

Life before internet

It is surprising to notice that Dutch internet nomads think that before internet there was waste land as far as online is concerned. The memorial book at the occasion of the academic network SURFnet start its introduction, saying that The Netherlands was barren as far as networks was concerned before the introduction of the academic network [ii].  However, almost a history of more than twenty years of online activity has been forgotten either by the absence of the knowledge or by very selective perception of history.

The beginning of new media in 1967 in The Netherlands has been pinned down to the start of a study to use a computer in the editorial process of the international, scientific publishing house, Excerpta Medica, initiated by Dr Pierre Vinken (photograph: 3rd person from the left), a neurologist and later CEO of Reed-Elsevier. The editorial staff of Excerpta Medica abstracted articles and published them per medical discipline in magazines, provided with keywords, which were fitted in a hierarchical keyword system on cards, a thesaurus. The computer was seen as an assistant in processing the editorial workflow and the consistency of keywords and it would speed up the printing process. Besides for the future it would offer the creation of new abstract magazines and digital derivatives such as magnetic tape services and online information services. By 1969 the system was up and running, while the knowledge gained by the computer department was used in a large reference work project The Great Spectrum Encyclopaedia[iii] and, partly, in the academic library project PICA.

Searching

Search in the Kluwer legal database (ASCII)

From 1967 onwards it was a period of experimenting in a developing online world. Computer technology and telecom technology were combined into services, offering access to text and numerical databases by keyboards and dumb terminals. Central computer systems with databases could be remotely accessed and searched. As transfer protocol between the central computer and the devices, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was used; searching in the databases was command driven. The technology for database services were developed were developed in the USA in the early seventies of last century and the technology was transferred to Europe soon after.
Commercial information services for business analysts and scientists such as SDC and Dialog came into existence and Excerpta Medica as well as some Dutch governmental services started to deliver (ASCII) abstract databases and updates to those services.  By 1975 the first serious investment into database publishing was made by the publishing company Kluwer, which started to develop a legal database from 1975 onwards.

Videotex

The ASCII database services were centred around mini-computers, computer devices and from 1977 onwards on personal computers. In Europe however another online technology, named videotext[iv], was developed by the British Post Office (BPO). By using the television set as a delivery station, access was gained to a central computer. While ASCII databases were line driven, videotex was page oriented, presenting a screen page of 24 lines of 40 digits, delivering text in seven colours. The information was structured like a tree with pages in numerical levels from 0 to 9. The use of television in combination with the telephone and the screen pages were seen as an advantage to reach small business enterprises and residential population. Stimulated by the emerging European Community, many postal organisations started to experiment with the technology.
In The Netherlands there was a first viewing of the system in 1976. It was only in 1978 that the technology was shown during a Dutch consumer electronics fair FIRATO and aroused some excitement among a number of companies. Given the reactions by companies the Dutch post organisation PTT announced the start of the service Viditel for 1980 later in the year. At the same time the Dutch publishing company VNU created a videotext consultancy TVS as it saw a threat for its jbo advertisements in the system for its controlled circulation weeklies.

PC services for amateurs

The trend of PC services for amateurs such as Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and consumer ASCII services like CompuServe in the USA, well known for their e-mail services at the end of the seventies, did not catch on hold in The Netherland till the mid-eighties.

Professional users

From the early beginning of online information services worldwide Dutch professional users had started to use the services for mainly financial inquiries or scientific research. They used mainly American services like Reuters, Dialog, SDC and BRS. European scientific databases were made available by the European Space Agency as well as British and French services. These professionals were usually employed by and searching as an intermediary on behalf of multinational companies or universities. In 1977 they established a professional association of Dutch intermediaries (VOGIN), published a book on search techniques in 1981 and set up a training program.

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[i]   Geert Lovinck (2011), My First Recession: Critical Internet Cultures in Transition. Nai Publishers.

[ii]  Verhoog, Jeroen (2008), SURFnet 1988-2008: twintig jaar grensverleggend netwerken. SURFnet.

[iii] The Great Spectrum Encyclopaedia by the publishing house Het Spectrum, a VNU subsidiary, prepared format for the Academic American Encyclopaedia, published in print and experimentally online in 1980 by Arête Publishing, a VNU subsidiary. In 1982 an interactive version was published on a videodisk and shown at the Frankfurt Book Fair. By 1985 the  Academic American Encyclopaedia was sold to the US publisher Grolier and produced in print and an on CD-ROM.

[iv] Videotex is the general term for the technology initially using a television set as delivery station. The term viewdata has also been used early in the development but had to be cancelled due to a brand name registration conflict.  

Instalment 3:  Commercial online services and offline products