Abstract
For the past two years, the MITRE Corporation has been demonstrating an interactive television system in Reston, Virginia. This system allows homes in Reston to interact with a computer at the MITRE Corporation eleven miles from the city. The computer manages the acquisition of a variety of data on call from any of the homes in Reston, including games, financial news, educational materials, and a few dozen other services that demonstrate the potential of this new medium. The demonstration also enables home users to utilize the minicomputers as calculating machines, using home keyboards similar to those used on currently popular fifty dollar hand calculators.
This is the only true interactive system operating today in the sense that personal services are provided to individual homes, rather than simply providing a response mechanism in the home to a program which is publicly broadcasted.
This paper will describe the Reston demonstration. It will show how the system is put together, what the results have been to date, and what the plans are for the future.
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