Unboxing the digital cultural heritage

I have just unboxed a piece of cultural heritage related to the history of the Danish web in the 1990s: ‘Telepakken — Porten til Cyberspace’. Telepakken was sold by the national Danish telephone company TeleDanmark from August 1995, based on the idea that it was very difficult to sell this immaterial thing — the internet/web — to customers who had no idea about what it was, how they could use it, and for what. Therefore, customers needed to buy ‘something’, a tangible object.

Telepakken is a little bigger than the size of an A4 sheet, and it comes with a small plastic handle which you can use to carry home this precious object. When you open it it contains:

• Explore OnNet, which is a guideline to get online, which programs to install, legal issues, and other relevant knowledge for the newcomer to the internet.
• Rejsefører til Cyberspace by Claus Bülow Christensen that in newspaper ads for Telepakken is maintained to be the first book in Danish about the internet which is not exactly right — however, the booklet gave the newcomer to the internet a guided tour of what to see, use, and do.
• E-post Danmark: Katalog over elektroniske postadresser, a book that we couldn’t imagine published today, but which made perfectly sense in 1995: a telephone-like book with all email addresses in Denmark, like you would expect to have a telephone book with all telephone numbers; there are many interesting things to be said about this, for instance in the early days of the web for the telephone company it still made sense to publish email adresses as a print book and not online, also that the book was mostly about email addresses in the X.400 format that the telephone company supported, even if email adresses with the @-sign had been in use for a while — in general what Marshall McLuhan calls a ‘rear mirror’ approach to what they were looking at: the were looking ahead to the web, but kept an eye on what they could see in their rear mirror from the past: printed books, and email addresses that they could control. The X.400 address of Tele Danmark’s e-post hotline was ‘X.400: O=tele-danmark/S=adresse-oplysning/A=dk400/C=dk’ — no wonder it was outcompeted by the @-sign…

The package also contained a modem and browser software such as Netscape and Explorer. The price in 1996 was 1,195 DKK, including 1 month’s free internet subscription which equals a little more than 2,000 DKK in 2025.

I have been so fortunate as to have been handed over this cultural heritage artefact from Ida Engholm, professor of design theory and design history at the Royal Danish Academy. It is my possession now, once I retire it will be handed over to a museum.