Prestel (Was: Re: What is this??? - Update)

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Tue Jun 15 04:31:22 2004

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 01:53, Pete Turnbull wrote:
> There were quite a few other viewdata services besides Prestel. Some
> large businesses used viewdata, a few bulletin boards did, the Open
> University, some banks, and it was widely used by travel agents --
> there was a special system run by a consortium for clearing holiday
> bookings. Derivatives included the French Minitel service, Germany's
> Bildschirmtext, and Canada had something too. The last commercial
> viewdata system I know of (Bank of Scotland HOBS service) finally
> closed last month (though it may still be running for special
> purposes).

I'd love to see the server-side of things running somewhere again
though.

It'd be nice to have a Prestel server at Bletchley with some assorted
80's machines hooked up to it (bodging the phone network inbetween :)
but chances are that nobody's got a copy of the necessary server
software any more :-(

Even if they did have the server software, I can't see them having a
snapshot of live data from the 80's which is what would make it really
interesting. I don't really fancy writing a few hundred fake pages :-)

I've heard mention of some sort of viewdata server system there (not
Prestel), although I haven't personally stumbled across it in storage
yet (no room currently to have it on display!). PDP hardware IIRC. I'll
have to find some more details and then see how viable it is to get
running again...

> It would seem that there is little point in finishing off the rough
> edges on my X-Windows Prestel terminal software ;-)

See above :-)

cheers

Jules
Received on Tue Jun 15 2004 - 04:31:22 BST