Prestel

Prestel was the Post Office’s viewdata service: numbered pages of text and blocky colour graphics, delivered over an ordinary phone line to a modified television or a dedicated terminal. Samuel Fedida designed the system at Post Office research, a test service ran from October 1978, and the commercial service launched in September 1979. Subscribers browsed an inverted tree of pages, from general topics down to specifics, and read news, searched classified ads such as Simpatico, or did home banking through terminals like the one the Nottingham Building Society supplied. It never reached mass households: about 18,000 users in 1982 (3,000 residential), about 70,000 in 1986, and a peak of 95,460 attached terminals around 1988-89, with real subscribers fewer because businesses ran several terminals each.

Its most famous moment was a break-in. In November 1984 the Prestel mailbox of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was breached. Robert Schifreen and Steve Gold were charged in 1985 with forgery, because Britain had no law against unauthorised computer access; Schifreen was convicted in April 1986 and fined 750 pounds. The Court of Appeal quashed the convictions in July 1987 and the House of Lords rejected the Crown’s appeal in April 1988. Parliament answered with the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

BT closed Micronet 800 in October 1991, and in 1994 it sold Prestel to a consortium of ViewInn, ICV and Michael Holland, which took over on 1 April 1994 as NewPrestel. The new owners aimed it at business financial data, moved it onto the Web in mid-1996 as Prestel On-line, and its internet service closed in 2002. The Post Office’s national viewdata service ended in 1994; the name lingered as a business-data reseller for another eight years. By the time the Web arrived offering the same pages without a closed network or a per-page charge, Prestel had already lost the audience it was built to reach.