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

From: Rob O'Donnell <classiccmp.org_at_irrelevant.fsnet.co.uk>
Date: Tue Jun 15 11:22:25 2004

>
>
>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 :-(

This is something I would like to see, too.

I should still have enough equipment and software about to set up at least
two of the various BBC-micro based servers which I ran at various times,
including the multi-user software that the GnomeAtHome ran on which I had
an official copy of...

Maybe when I finally get the spare room sorted out, I'll have enough space
to stack a couple of machines up and run the BBS again, linked to a
terminal server, I think, not the raft of phone lines I used to have...
(Ah, the joys of building ring-detect circuits for cheap and nasty 1200
baud modems that didn't have them..)

>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...

There was a viewdata server for internal use at Micronet's London office
when I worked there back in the '80s. It was definitely a PDP11 of some
flavour, (two waist-high white cabinets, three huge white disc packs.) I
don't know what software it actually ran, but we used standard prestel
terminals with it.. There was a normal console sat on top we used to run
the backups on (swap packs, copy up, swap packs, copy down..) Maybe you
got that, or something similar?




> > 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 - 11:22:25 BST