The AT&T 1300 Video Transaction Terminal was an affordable videotex machine meant for home users to connect to their bank account information, issue checks electronically, move money between banking accounts, etc. The videotex systems, of which AT&T’s used their own covidea system, were highly centralized, and end users interacted with them on dumb terminals or even televisions.
The AT&T 1300 was released Summer 1985 as a joint venture between Chemical Bank, Bank of America, Time, INC, and AT&T. This venture was called Covidea, and attempted to allow home users the ability to review their bank information through a 300 bit per second phone connection connected via phone line and viewed on their TV. Videotex Home Banking systems like Covidea were released in the mid-80’s, and were mostly a failure in the US market. Covidea itself failed after a $50 million marketing push by December 1988.
The Pronto system was created in the mid-1980's by a Jericho, L.I., company called Covidea, founded by Chemical, American Telephone and Telegraph, and Time Inc. (Time dropped out later). Its goal, as with most other systems, was to handle transactions electronically, like the payment of bills to creditors who participated in the system. Depositors could also transfer funds between accounts, reconcile checking records and get account balances.
''The acceptance was fairly low'' among bank customers in the target market, said Eileen McNamara Raisch, the consumer laboratory director for A.T.&T. ''The market for videotex services never seemed to materialize the way we envisioned.''
Barbara A. Sullivan, a senior vice president of Chemical, told Pronto subscribers in announcing the end of the system that ''the market for videotex services simply has not grown as rapidly as expected.'' The bank offered to give $25 to subscribers who had bought a special A.T.&T. terminal for $49.95 and to add half a percentage point to the interest rate on some certificates of deposit. Computer experts said the terminal was not very useful for other functions.From the reporting at the time, the videotex market was never that mainstream in the US, was relatively expensive, and was subsumed by the rise of the PC and their connectivity to the World Wide Web.
In regard to the keyboard within the terminal, it is pretty terrible and cannot be used as-is on a modern PC. The keycaps are thick PBT, and the case for the machine has a retro dark plastic frame with a built-in keyboard cover to make it easy to store the terminal when it isn’t in use. The keys use a spring over membrane to register a key press. The spring sits in a round hole in the plastic face plate, with a barrel on the key itself that the spring also sits within. Then a wider spring, not as tightly wound, rests between the the keycap and the plate, giving the user a sharp key press that feels exactly like pushing down on an old metal spring. The springs even whine when depressed, which perfectly matches the whine of my heart after typing a few lines on it.
I would not recommend purchasing this terminal unless you get it for its retro styling or as a collector of early computing.
View of the face plate, barrel, and membrane.
View of a removed keycap, large spring, and smaller keystroke activation spring.
View with the large and small springs placed back into position.
View of the full keyboard. Notice the dark plastic above the keys is on a hinge, allowing it to swing back down to cover the keys.
View of the rear of the terminal, show a ON/OFF locking switch, phone and line out jacks, video out, and printer.
