1984 – 2002retired
Classic Mac OS
“It taught the world to point and click, then stepped aside with its trash can emptied.”
“Sent kanji as pictures when keyboards could not, and never quite found its audience.”
CAPTAIN — the Character and Pattern Telephone Access Information Network system — was NTT's Japanese videotex service, announced in 1978 and launched commercially in November 1984. Where European systems transmitted text characters, Captain sent whole pages as pre-rendered images, because fitting thousands of kanji into a terminal was deemed impossible in the late 1970s. By December 1985 it had 650 information provid
But love never arrived in volume: by March 1992 the system still had only 120,000 subscribers, and like videotex systems worldwide — Minitel excepted — it never broke through. NTT kept the pages flowing until quietly retiring the service in 2002. What remains is a charming footnote: a network that faxed the internet to Japan before the internet got there.
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