lead, but each state kept standalone databases and services. The key to its success was that the phone company offered only the service and phone subscriber databases and third parties—banks, database providers, newspapers—offered additional content and services. The system peaked at 70 thousand subscribers around 1995. South Africa Beltel was launched by Telkom in the mid-eighties and continued until 1999. Comparison to the Internet today While some people consider videotex to be the precursor of the Internet, the two technologies evolved separately and reflect fundamentally different assumptions about how to computerize communications. The Internet in its mature form (after 1990) is highly decentralized in that it is essentially a federation of thousands of service providers whose mutual cooperation makes everything run, more or less. Furthermore, the various hardware and software components of the Internet are designed, manufactured and supported by thousands of different companies. Thus, completing any given task on the Internet, such as retrieving a webpage, relies on the contributions of hundreds of people at a hundred or more distinct companies, each of which may have only very tenuous connections with each other. In contrast, videotex was always highly centralized (except in the French Minitel service, also including thousands of information providers running their own servers connected to the packet switched network "TRANSPAC"). Even in videotex networks where third-party companies could post their own content and operate special services like forums, a single company usually owned and operated the underlying communications network, developed and deployed the necessary hardware and software, and billed both content providers and users for access. The exception was the transaction processing videotex system developed in the UK by Michael Aldrich in 1979, which brought teleshopping (or online shopping as it was later called) into prominence and was the idea developed later through the Internet. Aldrich's systems were based on minicomputers that could communicate with multiple mainframes. Many systems were installed in the UK including the world's first supermarket teleshopping system. Nearly all books and articles (in English) from videotex's heyday (the late 1970s and early 1980s) seem to reflect a common assumption that in any given videotex system, there would be a single company that would build and operate the network. Although this appears shortsighted in retrospect, it is important to realize that communications had been perceived as a natural monopoly for almost a century — indeed, in much of the world, telephone networks were