Tag Archives: NAPLPS

Ads for the American service Time Teletext (1981-1983).

From the press kit to Gateway, an American videotex service by Times Mirror, 1984-1986.

Time Teletext was a US teletext service, 1981-1983. Compared to common British teletext, Time offered smooth vector graphics with the NAPLPS-standard (common in American videotex). Time used satellite and cabe cable, so it had more pages and a better frame than other teletext. That paved the way for teletext games sucha as Dire Straits and Outer Space Zoo. The games turned out to be more popular than the news, which was not what Time was hoping for with their $25,000,000+ investment…

VIEWTRON: An ASCII / NAPLPS Hybrid
Video / ELECTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIAS (Byte. Issue: Jul, 1984)

Pictures created on Time Video Information Services’s Teletext system

Viewtron system run by Knight-Ridder newspapers and AT&T (1983)

UI screens from AT&T’s 1983 Viewtron system (1983), album by Philip Bump.

Prodigy (online service), pictures by Benj Edwards.

The service was presented using a graphical user interface. The Data Object Architecture wrapped vector and incremental point graphics, encoded as per the North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax NAPLPS, along with interpretative programs written in the proprietary languages TBOL (Trintex Basic Object Language) and PAL (Prodigy Application Language). NAPLPS was authored in 1979 by Jerry Soloway and Bill Frezza from Bell Laboratory and Bob Bedard from CBS Laboratory.

Telidon/NAPLPS ads created for Bank of America (1982) by John Vaughan at The Communication Studio. More examples on his Youtube channel. In 2019 he posted more graphics and info on his blog.