Author: Andrew Egan / Source: Atlas Obscura
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were an exciting time for technology and communications.
Engineers and programmers were racing to put new developments to use, some seeking to make the world a better place, others just wanting to see how the technology would develop. Greg Stetski and Art Doerksen wanted to do a bit of both.Genesis StoryTime debuted in 1982 to a small contingent of cable service subscribers in western Canada. The brainchild of Stetski and Doerksen, two Canadian engineers, Genesis StoryTime used a service known as Telidon to distribute children’s books over television screens. Describing the technology powering the channel can be challenging—it’s somewhat similar in nature to the technology used on the Prodigy computer network, an infamously hard-to-archive service—but comparing it to flight information monitors at airports, in which a computer is used to display simple information over a variety of screens, is useful.
Developed by Canada’s Communication Research Centre, Telidon is videotex technology that uses coordinated shapes to create simple graphics and even crude animation. Some hail Telidon as a pioneer of the graphical web. Unfortunately, because of the constraints of this technology, graphics were about all Genesis StoryTime had to offer.
Sound wasn’t available. While some saw this as a limitation, Stetski and Doerksen saw an advantage.“The channel was always intended to be silent,” Stetski says from his home in Manitoba, Canada. “We wanted to use television to bring parents and kids together.”
Publishers were quick to jump into the project, and soon the channel had more than 300 stories. With a 90 words-per-minute read rate, stories typically ran from 10 to 15 minutes. While the majority of the content came from mainstream authors, like Roger Hargreaves of Mr. Men fame, Stetski estimates about 10 percent were Bible stories. The decision to run the Bible stories was somewhat practical as the rights were in the public domain. However, Stetski kept them in rotation out of personal conviction, despite financial pressure to do otherwise.
“[One cable system owner] said if I got rid of the Bible stories he’d put us in every home in Florida,” Stetski says. Still, he kept the faith.
The channel steadily grew to reach 40 cable stations across North and Central America, and Stetski says they hit between two and three million at one point. Nevertheless, footage of Genesis StoryTime is incredibly difficult to come by. It was never intended to be recorded then…
The post Searching for Genesis StoryTime, a Lost Canadian Cable Channel appeared first on FeedBox.