Telaction Cable Shopping - Precursor to the Internet

Telation was a Chicagoland telepone touch-tone cable based shopping service introduced in the late 1980's. Consumers would use their telephone to navigate through screens and products while watching the prompts and pictures on a cable channel. This was very cool and ahead of its time, considering the Internet was only a few years away. Telaction was owned by JC Penney and was discontinued approximately one year after its initial introduction in Naperville, IL on Jones Intercable. I came across a clamshell VHS tape that was mailed to our family in the late 80's that explained how the service worked. I personally used the service one time back in the day to buy a winter coat (I was 15 years old using my parents' credit card). It's interesting to see how you would place an order and no confirmation # (or email these days) would appear. Remember back when you would place an order and simply hope that it arrived as expected? You get the idea. I don't think this service 'flopped' so much as JC Penney simply could not find an investor to make this new technology go large scale.For you techies: I did some reading on the Internet and found that over 100 million dollars was invested in this technology. The screens were provided by video disc players, and complicated 'frame grabber' technology had to be installed at each neighborhood cable node to allow for a city of 75,000 people to to use the service.Enjoy!

Channel: Education
Uploaded: December 31, 1969 at 6:59 pm
Author: davismv

Length: 09:59
Rating: 5.00
Views: 676

Tags: Home  IL  Intercable  Internet  JC  Jones  Naperville  Penney  Precursor  Shopping  Telaction  

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