The first online shopping system invented by Michael Aldrich in 1979 was enabled by Videotex technology. Aldrich connected a modified domestic television to a real-time transaction-processing computer through an ordinary telephone line, creating an interactive shopping system before the modern Web existed.
Videotex displayed pages of text and simple graphics on a television and let users navigate structured, menu-driven services. Unlike a one-way broadcast, the system supported two-way communication, which made it possible to browse products, send orders, and process transactions remotely. Aldrich called the concept “teleshopping”; later writers generally described it as online shopping or e-commerce.
The invention was demonstrated publicly in 1979 and developed into commercial systems during the 1980s. Thomson Holidays introduced a recorded business-to-business online shopping system in 1981, while later projects included a Tesco-linked home-shopping trial in Gateshead.
Videotex is often confused with Teletext. Teletext primarily delivered broadcast information one way, whereas Videotex was interactive. SSL and HTML became important much later, with the rise of secure Web commerce in the 1990s.