Cov ... id ... ea
Before SARS-CoV-2 had its viral moment as the pathogen behind the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the most notorious use of pentagraph prefix "Covid" was certainly the Covidea videotex service. Well, by "certainly" I mean "". By "the most notorious", I obviously mean "a". You see, I'm living like it's 1985. Surely you're dialing up to read this and paying by the minute. Every extra character you download at 300 baud works out to around 3 milliseconds connected to me. As a 1985-era telefax provider, that could work out to 3 ten-thousandths of a cent per character per reader plus change. Ne plus ultra! Since we're dreaming anyway, let's hallucinate our readership up to ten thousand and imagine pocketing three cents a word.
Here in 1985, it's clear that Americans are crazy for anything French – whether it's cars from Renault and Peugeot, racing bicycles from Gitane and ... Peugeot, or pepper mills from a more historic company like Peugeot. Speaking of ground spice, Americans are also wild about a variety of French luxury goods from outfits that sound straight out of that recent David Lynch movie "Dune". Dollar for dollar, Americans like the House of Dior even more than House Atreides! It's a pretty safe bet that Americans are going to go gonzo for a local version of the French PTT videotex service Minitel. AT&T, Time, and Chemical Bank seem to agree. The three have formed the joint venture Covidea to bring a similar service to the US. It's hard to imagine how this could fail. With AT&T? Sure, divestiture means that AT&T completely lacks access to local telephone markets but they still have the blockbuster WE 32100 32-bit microprocessor. Time Inc is probably the savviest media company in the country and would never sleepwalk into a deal with a struggling multimedia/consumer electronics company like Warner or merge with a dialup communications provider like QuantumLink. I hear that Steve Case, head honcho over at Quantum, is thinking about rebranding the firm "America Online". Nobody but nerds know what "online" means anyway and everybody in New York will think it means that you have to stand around and wait. Adding "America" further diminishes the French mystique associated with svelte telephone terminals in the kitchen.
Finally, there is Chemical Bank. They have been piloting Pronto, a Minitel-style banking service, in the US using available home computers since 1982. Who can argue with Chemical about this? (from "Chemical Bank's Experience with Home Banking, Lee Pomeroy, Economic Review, July/August 1984):
Cable's advantage is that it allows for motion video, and so it clearly will be part of some home information services in the distant future. But cable is not interactive today and there is little likelihood that its suppliers will re-lay the extensive cable system already in place. To base a home information system on the potential of two-way cable appears misguided. In addition, the universe of potential customers on cable systems is quite different from and smaller than the number with telephones. For these reasons, Pronto is based on the telephone.
With these three titans on board, how could this possibly fail? Sure, it might face some stiff competition from the all-star team at Trintex that Sears/IBM/CBS are putting together but that system targets IBM PC systems that cost over two thousand dollars! I love that Trintex sounds nothing at all like a very scary nuclear plastic explosive from the minds at Los Alamos. I wonder if they will keep that name.
Now that I can think about it, there is one thing that troubles me. Americans just watched the apparent value of home computers plummet from thousands of dollars to tens of dollars. Commodore's VIC-20 machine is now available even below the most recent $85 price. My favorite machine, the TI 99/4a, was just blown out for $49! (I'll probably still be talking about that machine forty years from now). Who wants to spend $5 an hour using an online service like CompuServe when the computer costs only ten hours worth of connection? Those IBM PC fat cats with their $2k machines would take two hundred hours to reach that point of reflection. That could take a year! Think of it this way – gas is about a dollar a gallon right now. A new '85 Dodge Aries wagon will run you about $8k and get 25 miles per gallon. You would have to somehow wring 200,000 miles from that car to spend as much on gas as you spent on the car. You could wrap that Aries around the world eight times for the cost of downloading eight hundred megabytes from an online service. It's hard to imagine Covidea getting all the way around the world once, let alone again and again.
They say you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes but maybe it's the latency of a wagon full of gas that shouldn't be slept on. Sure, the first character of the newspaper is a doozy but once you get down to the library, you can read the rest of them as fast as you please. Graphics. Random access. Color too, if it's Sunday comics. I know that's Luddite talk. Computers are getting faster all the time. In 40 years, that future Dodge will probably only get 75 miles per gallon but the computer could run a hundred million cycles per second. Latency will be a thing of the past once the machine responds to my keypresses as fast as I think them and cues up all the world's knowledge from a – what comes after mega? – from a laser unit of a dozen gigabytes or more. That disc might be no larger physically than a pressing of Thriller and pressed on the same type of machine. There's more of those in the United States than there are computers! In fact, Thriller is already available in laser format – both as a familiar LP-sized disc but laser video, as "Making Michael Jackson's Thriller", and the increasingly common digital Compact Disc audio format that's around the size of a computer floppy disc.
A Pop moonwalk versus Dodge moonroof latency battle is a Motown v. Motown showdown that I'd pay five bucks an hour to watch. While it just looks like a leak from Bell's lab at the moment, I hope I don't have to wait 40 years for Covidea to take over the market. By the way, that Aries wagon can trace its lineage to the European Chrysler Horizon and back to the Simca 1100. Vive le France.
This post pairs well with "Wanna be Starting Something" / Thriller / Michael Jackson / 1982.