Does anyone remember the Teleguides?

[Long Island Mike]

Everyone: I remember from my Toronto trips back in the mid 80s era computer terminals posted at strategic locations called Teleguides. for me it was an introduction to internet-or therabouts technology. They had good info on Toronto including features such as local news,weather and sports. I also recall that they were used in other cities-I recall info on them promoting San Francisco-once I was able to actually get into the SF info and access it thru a TOR Teleguide. When were they introduced and when were they removed and if anyone knows why? It was really neat technology for the mid 80s era. LI MIKE

 

[disparishun]

Yes, I remember using one at the Thornhill Community Centre (Bayview and John), right around the same period.

I believe it was part of the wave of videotex service put out there in the dying days of the telcos' efforts to push X.25 as a (centrally-controlled) data networking standard, before the (edge-controlled) Internet finally overtook everything else.

In other words, another Minitel alternative -- I think the platform was known as Telidon. The Alex project pushed by Bell Canada, just a little bit later than that, used very similar technology, and was a more explicitly Minitel-style service.

(Minitel being the French implementation of this. France was one of the few places where it caught on, which was hailed as a great technological success there, but then got made fun of a little bit when that very success slowed early Internet adoption somewhat -- since they already had, after all, perfectly good information terminals in the home.)

 

[Chuck100]

Mid 80s was too early for me to use a computer, however I do remember seeing one, just one, movie at Thornhill Square. I'd love to see what's going on in the parking lot right now, however I've got no reason to go back.

 

[adma]

The first of those (or something like it) I saw was, weirdly enough, at the just-reopened Kinoshita-ized ROM in 1982.

I found it fascinating, in a "look at all these places you can go to!" kind of way--but also oddly depressing, maybe because there seemed to be some corporate or governmental bureaucracy about it; or maybe because the age of electronic infinity wasn't all it was cracked up to be. A very "proto-Internet" experience, indeed...