 In fact, the most successful online services of the period were not videotex services at all.Despite the promises that videotex would appeal to the mass market, the videotex services were comfortably out-distanced by Dow Jones News/Retrieval (begun in 1973), CompuServe and (somewhat further behind) The Source, both begun in 1979.None were videotex services, nor did they use the fixed frame-by-frame videotex model for content.