Date   : Sun, 18 Jan 2009 12:25:37 +0000
From   : darren.grant@... (Darren Grant)
Subject: Prestel

I agree with Mark Usher if Peter Sweasey wants to do it properly then a
slight reevaluation might be needed, unless the family who is participating
in this is a wealthy family where the father has a job in the city as a
stock broker or something.

You have to remember that in the 80's that many low income families didn't
have a phone at all and those that did had a 'Party line' that meant that
you couldn't use the phone while your neighbor was using theirs. While phone
line ownership in the middle classes boomed in the 80's and even began to
become more common in working class homes the cost of using the phone was so
high that people were reluctant to use the phone more than they had to.

Prestel was never a home thing unless your dad happened to be a senior bank
executive. And then the idea of letting your kids spend half an hour on it
at a cost of 5p a min in the evening for a local call would set you back
?1.50 expensive in those days. If I recall Prestel was not local unless you
lived in central London. Certainly in my house the ridiculously high cost of
the then monopoly BT meant that my parents wouldn't allow the use of a modem
even if I wanted to. Those lucky people who did have a modem would use one
of the many Bulletin Board Systems and later CompuServe before the internet.

Prestel, isn't "clearly the forerunner of what we do online today" in my
opinion, it was a niche service almost exclusive to business, nothing like
the French system that was common in homes. What was the forerunner of the
internet as we use it today were the various bulletin board systems in
particular CompuServe.

The closest most people got to an on-line information service was Teletext.
Teletext in the form of Ceefax and ORACLE was huge, far more homes would be
checking news and playing simple puzzles on Teletext as you could use it as
much as you liked without paying by the minute.

Your TV programme Mr Sweasey must feature Teletext if it is to be authentic.
If your house is a typical household today the equivalent 80's household
wouldn't have Prestel or even a BBC Micro in most cases.

Darren


On 18/01/2009 11:19, "Mark Usher" <mu.list@...> wrote:

> Surely Prestel wasn't in the average home that much, more banks and travel
> agents - although it was on everyone's wish list!
> 
> What the majority did use back in the day for "email", were BBS systems and
> that would be significantly easier to set up in the time frame. With a
> simple modem and terminal software these were available for almost all home
> computers of the era without the need of a Prestel adapter.
> 
> Just my 2penneth...
> 
> -Mark Usher
> www.bbcdocs.com
>