Prestel was a UK service; asymmetric 1200/75 using a Videotext client. It predated Fidonet by about five years. Prestel was big in the UK partly because the ub

Prestel was a UK service; asymmetric 1200/75 using a Videotext client. It predated Fidonet by about five years. Prestel was big in the UK partly because the ubiquitous BBC Micro had a Videotext chip in it, so a modem made a very obvious upgrade if you had one. But you could also get standalone terminals. Never saw one myself. France, by the way, had an equivalent system, but which was hugely more popular: Minitel. It was technically very similar to Prestel (it may even have used the same protocols and videotext chip, but I can't find a reference). It started rollout in 1978. In the late 1990s there were an estimated 25 million subscribers (in a country with a population of 60 million!). Minitel finally got turned off in 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel