charges and with users needing to pay installation and rental fees, such an investment was considered likely to pay off handsomely for BT and that they would be "cleaning up" by providing an interactive service that, in contrast to teletext services such as Ceefax and Oracle, could support a range of commercial activities. A "mass public service" was envisaged, with considerable public take-up, but a lack of compelling content and services gave domestic users in particular the impression of Prestel being something that "would cost them a lot for relatively little". Thus, Prestel became more like "a fragmented series of computer-linked private systems" used and run by various companies such as American Express and Thomas Cook, for whom adoption of the technology made sense operationally. Nevertheless, it was predicted that eventually, "Prestel - or another viewdata system - will be ubiquitous". Successes In contrast to the demise of the British system, the French equivalent of Prestel, Teletel/Minitel, received substantial public backing when millions of Minitel terminals were handed out free to telephone subscribers (causing Alcatel huge financial problems). As a consequence the Teletel network became very popular in France, and remained well used, with access later also possible over the Internet. After a short postponement, Minitel closed finally on 30 June 2012. In 1979 the New Opportunity Press launched Careerdata, an interactive graduate recruitment service devised and designed by Anthony Felix, the New Opportunity Press MD, and supported by GEC's Hirst Research centre in Wembley, London, who provided 12 terminals which were installed in the largest UK university careers advisory services. This was the first commercial application on the new medium and was featured in the Prestel Road Show which toured the UK and some European centres. A closed-access videotex system based on the Prestel model was developed by the travel industry, and continues to be almost universally used to this day by travel agents throughout the country: see Viewdata. The Prestel technology was also sold abroad to several countries, and in 1984 Prestel won a UK Queen's Award to Industry both for its innovative technology and use of British products (it largely ran on equipment provided by GEC Computers). In 1979 Michael Aldrich developed an online shopping system, a type of e-commerce, using a modified domestic colour television equipped with the Prestel chipset and connected to a real-time transaction-processing computer via a domestic dial-up telelphone line. During the 1980s