Samuel Fedida

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Viewdata screen

Samuel Fedida (* 1918 in Alexandria , † 2007 ) was a British electrical engineer and head of the development of View Data , which in 1979 as PRESTEL from the General Post Office , the then British Post and Telecommunications Authority, and in 1977 as on-screen text Service (BTX) was introduced.

Fedida had been retired since 1995.

Viewdata and PRESTEL

Samuel Fedida came up with Viewdata in 1968 after reading The Computer as Communications Device by American scientists JCR Licklider and Bob Taylor . This year is therefore considered to be the birth of screen text and Fedida as its inventor. The so-called Viewdata Timeshare Common Carrier was operational in September 1975, a first version as early as 1974. It was thus possible to call up any content stored on a server over the telephone line and make it visible on the television at home. The system was named PRESTEL, derived from "Press Telephone Button" (on the TV remote control). The screen was displayed with 24 lines of 40 characters each, each character consisting of a matrix of 10 × 12 points. The PRESTEL system was first presented in Germany in November 1976 at the electronica trade fair in Munich and presented to the public the following year at the international radio exhibition in Berlin by the then Federal Post Office under the name of Screen Text. It is therefore a direct precursor to the World Wide Web.

Viewdata and PRESTEL were registered in 1975 by the UK Post Office in the United Kingdom, which has now expired. However, there were legal disputes over the corresponding US patents. In America there was initially no patent because Samuel Fedida forgot to postage the patent application sufficiently. Later (1980) it was submitted and the patent was finally granted in 1989. This was based on, among other things, a lawsuit brought by BT in the USA in 2000 , with which it demanded licenses for hyperlinks on the web from all . The lawsuit was dismissed in the US in 2002.

Publications

  • Samuel Fedida & Rex Malik: The Viewdata Revolution. Associated Business Press, London 1979, ISBN 0-85227-214-6

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Steve Crow: T-Online, Btx (screen text) and Datex-J ( Memento of July 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Goodbye, you beautiful switch star . In: heise online . August 28, 2002
  3. ↑ Hyperlink Patent - Terminal Apparatus In: About.com
  4. ↑ US court does not see any patent infringement in the use of hyperlinks . In: heise online . August 23, 2002
personal data
SURNAME Fedida, Samuel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British electrical engineer
DATE OF BIRTH 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Alexandria
DATE OF DEATH 2007