nothankyou777

People who get excited enough about politics in this country to shoot someone are stupid. Love him or hate him, Charlie is just somebody's puppet. If you see them on twitter or television, they are puppets. Puppeteers are smart enough to stay out of the spotlight. There is only one person in recent memory who was smart enough to go after a puppeteer.

We move from the "prison phone" to the escape-proof "prison phone", and the spiritual abominations on hackernews celebrate.

You're looking at it through internet-era glasses. We're talking late 70s to early 80s tech and prices. Equipment was expensive. Clients were charged by the minute. Without city-level populations, the numbers didn't pan out. If the prospects were brighter, companies would have been more serious about converging on a standard.

A late 80s / early 90s BBS is no comparison. Cost-per-everything in computers had plummeted by then--even kids could host a BBS with the family computer.

Per wiki on Prestel (i know it's videotex, but the article covered both):

Hosting Costs:

> In 1985, British Telecom estimated that for an IP using a typical minicomputer (such as the PDP-11) located 100 km from London and handling up to 10 users simultaneously at peak times, the one-off software set-up cost would be at least £16,000, communication costs would range from £4,280 to £5,550 a year (depending on the type of connection), and Prestel usage would cost £8,600 a year.[82]: 4

Usage Costs:

> At the launch of the commercial service in September 1979, and in addition to phone charges, users were charged 3p per minute online to Prestel from 8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday, and 3p for three minutes at other times. Installing a phone jack-socket cost £13, with a quarterly rental of 50p. Business users paid an additional standing charge (i.e., a flat charge regardless of usage) of £12 per quarter.[23]

> By October 1982, the online usage charge had risen to 5p per minute (8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday and also 8 am to 1 pm on Saturdays, free at other times), the business standing charge to £15 per quarter, residential users now paid £5 per quarter, and jack installation cost "from £15", with a 15p quarterly rental fee.[24]: 2

Content Distribution Costs:

> A main IP rented pages from the Post Office (initially) or British Telecom (later), and controlled a three-digit master-page in the database. In 1982, this cost an annual £5,500 for a basic package,[24]: 1 equivalent to around £29,000 in 2021.[80]

Teletext had a better run in Europe for the same reason as public transport: higher population density. It is more economical when you can spread the cost over more customers. In places as sparsely populated as flyover US & Canada, the cost of maintaining a teletext presence wasn't worth the handful of contacts you'd get out of it. Boston or New York could have benefited, but for the rest of the country, it was brutally outperformed by the cork board.

You are projecting. Personally speaking, I would choose Electron waaaay before I'd choose GTK. That probably wasn't an option for his optimized terminal, but would be Good Enough™ for just about anything else.

Electron is bringing an entire web browser in to provide a cross-platform user interface. GTK has become almost a web browser to provide a cross-platform user interface. That is why I started off with

> CSS classes

To spell it out, I think it is all excessive.