Death of An Old Friend - A Reflection on Old Technology

The Guardian and others announced today the death of an old friend. To be perfectly honest I didn’t know the friend was still alive but there you go, time moves on and you forget. Seems however the old friend won’t actually have the life support pulled until January so there will be time to a final visit.
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/16/teletext-to-be-pulled-tv]

So allow me a little wallow in an old technology?

I first came across this trusty friend in 1974. It was called Oracle. Gosh it was exciting technology! Blocky little diagrams and snippets of hard to read news. Hard to believe now but it lasted nineteen years before it lost out to the now better known but not long for this world Teletext which took over in 1993.

Mind you even by 1993 it was beginning to look a bit long in the tooth. The same technology was used to drive the BT Prestel/Micronet service and I remember fondly spending hours working on those teletext type pages. They had two sides - literally. One for public view and one for manual editing of content routes and prices! This was the cutting edge of technology in those heady and far off days. The days when you stuck a BT handset into rubber suction cups and roared along at 300 baud if you were lucky although Prestel did offer the super high speed of 1200/75 baud.


In common with the Ceefax and ORACLE teletext services provided by the BBC and ITV television companies, the system used a modified television to display information in a non-scrolling window of 40x24 text characters, with some simple graphics, conforming to the 1981 CEPT1 standard. Unlike the restricted number of pages available on Ceefax and Oracle, Prestel offered an extensive range of information that had been supplied both by a Prestel department at the Post Office and by third-party information providers.

The range of Information Providers (or IPs) was wide, including: news services, travel companies (serving both the public and travel agents), estate agents, banks and financial services, those providing stock market information, the government and Parliament. The IPs entered their information on a central computer update, "Duke", located in London.

The computers we accessed were located in major telephone exchanges, were known by code names such as "Dryden", "Kipling", "Derwent", "Enterprise", "Dickens", "Keats", "Bronte", "Eliot" and " Austen "!

Prestel was launched as I recall in 1979 and was then sold as a domestic product with the advent of Micronet and Timefame from 1983 onwards with the arrival of home computers like the ZX Spectrum.

So it came to pass I went online in 1983 and haven’t been off it since!

This old technology had its darker side in my life as well here I was involved in my first and only hack, if we can call it that!

Access to online services was expensive phone bills were huge never mind the cost of viewing the actual pages. They were also similar systems throughout Europe. We had a little computer club running on a certain remote Hebridean island known for its whisky. We shared the modem! One night in the long world of innocence one of our members arrived at my house with said modem and we logged on and went off to explore the German service. I was horrified at the thought of my phone bill until the said member a BT engineer told us that had visited the exchange on his way to my house and a matchstick was in place stopping my calls being noted. High tech crime!

Anyway with these fond remembrances I pay my respects to the last relic of that old technology as it quietly goes off to that great mountain of old technology to rest in peace.