E-Shopping Revolution Inventive Genius:

MICHAEL ALDRICH

WHEN you think of e-shopping, you’d probably have two names in mind: Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma.

Actually, e-shopping was invented in 1979, not in the US or China, but in England.

In 1979 Michael Aldrich connected a domestic television by telephone line to a real-time transaction processing computer and invented what he called teleshopping. Today it is called online shopping.

Recalled Alrdich: “Early in 1979 a 26-inch colour television was delivered to my office on the Crawley Industrial Estate, Sussex.”

It was a prototype of a new TV designed for a new service to be offered by the Post Office (PTT) called ‘Prestel’. Prestel was a kind of Ceefax/Teletext service (available on UK broadcast TV providing news, weather and other text information) delivered by telephone line rather than broadcast by the BBC and ITV. Prestel was to be a paid commercial service.

Aldrich added that one day, one of their engineers, Peter Champion, asked if he could strip the TV and find out what was inside.

Some weeks later he came back and mentioned that he had found a chip set with a chip modem, a character generator and an auto-dialler that could hold four telephone numbers.

Champion said if they built a controller for one of their computers we could connect the TV just like Prestel. And that was it.

For Aldrich, his a-ha moment came in 1979 and he and his wife were walking their Labrador.

Aldrich was thinking about simplifying the boring weekly supermarket shopping expedition. All of a sudden he thought about the television and hooking it up to the supermarket and getting the supermarket to deliver the groceries.

That wild concept was presented during a convention in New Orleans in September 1979.

Their stand at the exhibition consisted of a table covered in green cloth with the TV on top. Under the table concealed by the cloth was the engineer lying on his back ready to ‘bodge’ the connection at the right moment during the presentation. He was there for three days!

But it worked. The visitors were interested, intrigued and excited. They even loved the picture quality on the TV!

Roger Newman and his team designed a multi- port controller for the TV and Jim Bethel built the complete interface software to run the system. And we set a public launch date of April 1980 for our new system. They were going to make a business of online shopping! The media were bemused. They latched on to the televisions connected to the computer. They seemed familiar but they didn’t understand the rest.

The actual product launch was a few days later in early April 1980 when they demonstrated systems around the UK.