The Captain system ("Character and Pattern Access Information Network System") was a Japanese

videotex Videotex (or interactive videotex) was one of the earliest implementations of an end-user information system. From the late 1970s to early 2010s, it was used to deliver information (usually pages of text) to a user in computer-like format, typi ...

system created by NTT. Announced in 1978, it was trialled from 1979 to 1981, with a second larger trial held from 1982 to 1983. The service launched commercially in 1983. It was closed on March 31, 2002. Captain differed from comparable European videotex systems by not being based on the transmission of alphanumeric characters. The Japanese

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...

character set has over 3,500 characters, and in the late 1970s to try to include a character generator in the user's terminal that could retain and then generate so many characters on demand was seen as prohibitive. Instead pages were therefore substantially sent to the end user as pre-rendered images, using coding strategies similar to

facsimile machine Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile), is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer o ...

s. By December 1985 Captain had 650 information providers, and the next year was rolled out to 245 cities. However, by March 1992 the system still only had 120,000 subscribers. Like other videotex systems worldwide (with the exception of the French

Minitel The Minitel was a videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and was the world's most successful online service prior to the World Wide Web. It was invented in Cesson-Sévigné, near Rennes in Brittany, France. The service was ...

), it never broke through to achieve mass-market usage.

External links

Thanks Captain
{{Videotex Videotex Pre–World Wide Web online services NTT Communications