Wait a minute - 828 bantams? What are the doing here? This is a 127 site isn't it? OK fair cop, these are NOT 127 cameras, but they are roll film, thats smaller than 120 and (just!) bigger than 35mm, so I figured we could give them a home here in their own little corner of the site.
828 is in fact 35mm film without the perforations - after all why punch holes in perfectly good film which you could be using to make bigger negatives. The holes in regular 35mm are needed to stop the film jumping around in movie cameras. When Kodak (and others) started putting it in still cameras, they just took it from the movie film production line and didn't care that we've been wasting all that film for years and years now! True some 35mm cameras do use the perforations, but only because they're there, not because they really need to.
So in 1935 Kodak took some 35mm film, don't punch the holes in it, and suddenly you get a larger negative area in a camera thats the same size! Great idea. Back in the olden days you had to roll your own 35mm into canisters, so buying it in roll film format was actually easier than canisters. To make it totally idiot proof they punched one hole per frame so the camera could automatically stop the film at the right point - no more peering through the red window (though if you do feel like respooling some 828 film then you can get by without the hole).
So what went wrong? I guess it was just not THAT much of an improvement. Build a better mousetrap, and chances are you'll be left with a shed full of mouse traps. It just never caught on. 8 frames per roll (later increased to 12) didn't help but for whatever reason, we still punch holes in 35mm film before we use it.
While 828 film ceased manufacture in the mid 80's, there is at least one footnote to the 828 story. While most people have never heard of 828, it did create a lineage which was at least for a while, a huge success. Years later Kodak took 828 film, put it in a plastic cartridge and called it 126 Instamatic. 126 was very sucsessfull, and you can still get it today (though it's harder to find that 127! Ferrania still make it if you're looking). 126 in turn was shrunk into 110 Pocket Instamatic format - still with the one hole per frame indexing system.
You can find more info on Kodak 828's here