At the time I think in most western Europe teletext was a thing. Imagine you had this menu on the TV with pages that have graphics of the Atari 2600, and you access by inserting 3 digits codes on the page, seeks the page for you, and presents what's in there. This was, in a nutshell, teletext
At some point much later teletext even go a chat function. Was with SMS, extremely expensive.Soome people went ham on the relationships zone (and at some point there was also a 18+ zone for dirty talk during the night)