When did Bell Canada pull the plug on the phone of the future?

Thane_Bitter

Back in 1995 when both Nortel, and RIM where still things, Bell released a series of Nortel built phones which used some sort of internal dial up system to extract information and display it on a monochrome screen built into the phone. Much like shards of pottery from civilizations before sometimes you find one of these things at a garage sale or other used stuff merchant, most don’t work, like the game boy of the same era the bonding tech used to attach the glass screen to the ribbon cable. Regardless it was an interesting idea but perhaps too late as the Internet was growing in terms of users and usability and people still opted for doing things in person rather than via a device.
So the question, and apologies for the preamble, when did Bell stop offering support for these “smart phone” services? And as a follow-up, did Bells pay phones use something similar because I recall they had VFD dot matrix displays that would convey information.

Old news story about it:

px_eliezer_

Thane_Bitter Old news story about it:

That story was meant to be legitimately serious, but looks so funny today.

px_eliezer_

This seems pretty similar to the MINITEL system used in France from 1982 through 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

Although those terminals were bigger, it WAS a phone company system.

Very popular in France, and lasted long after the dawn of the Internet.

Thane_Bitter

px_eliezer_ Reminded me of even older films/stories from the 50-70, I can’t recall the exact date, in which the phone would become the nexus of all things. At that time it was a logical conclusion because computers were still large, home systems were limited and the phone company had the income power and will to make it happen. It was interesting forward thinking conjecture but one never can fully predict the future.

I have seen these NT phones with US carriers stamped on them so perhaps some of the american telco’s offered such features for a time. The US phone system was a bit more fragmented in the 90s than it is now, trying to make a phone call from Fl, to Ontario - I think GTE was the local company down there was somewhat cumbersome if you wanted to use a calling card to bill the call (long distance still was costly back then) to a certain account or phone number. I never owned any of these phones during their heyday and was curious about them.