When they mentioned schools, I remember back in 1986/7 a friend at school was notified that he'd received a message from an old friend from another school on the library computer.
It was mostly an academia and business thing in the 80s. Regular people didn't really become aware until the WWW became a thing, and people got online with the early ISPs. I was using multi user computer systems in the mid 80s, (DEC-20, VAX) and had access to email over JANET (Joint Academic NETwork), but it was to friends who were also in academia. Later in the 90s, working at a different Uni we were using Internet Protocols and email formats we are familiar with today, rather than the old JANET CBS format.
Fascinating to watch with the benefit of almost 40 years hindsight. Like many commenting here I first heard about e mail in the mid 1990s which means that being 27 years old at the time of this broadcast I like many others was guilty of being asleep at the IT wheel. But notice how even the experts hadn't grasped the huge implications of what was about to happen: " rival the telephone by 1995"? My God .....
I love the story of Donald Knuth (famous computer scientist), who _stopped_ using email in 1990, and hasn't used it since. At that point he had used it since 1975 and commented that "it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime"
They couldn't grasp what would happen because the internet didn't exist at this point. Some might argue now that ARPANET already existed at the time but that's not the internet. Many didn't know about email before the internet so this is quite normal but comparing this to not knowing about something that didn't exist is a bit of a stretch.
It didn't actually end up rivalling it really. Not at all. Which is why we are all walking about with telephones pressed to our ears a great deal of the time... 😜
1986: The Joy of E-MAIL | Micro Live | Retro Tech | BBC Archive 0949am 17.10.24 i surmise the chap who sent the terribly worded email worked for the guardian..... and tried to get the legend: numkl puckuchul ftumsch into the oxford english dictionary.
I didn't know email was around as early as this. I was 11 in 1986. I don't remember coming across it until the mid 90's, when the first of my friends had access to it at home.
SMTP, the same email protocol that is used today first was published in 1980. ARPANET, the Internet's precursor, had email from around 1971, in fact the use of username@hostname address format for email goes back to 1971. Email had been actively used for around 15 years before this programme was filmed.
@@FlightEagle That's interesting. As a young woman I worked for a company with international clients and sent mail by Telex. It was electronic but was it the email we understand today?
Nice blast from the past! Though Social Media, snowballed being the qunessential ultimate evil born of the internet / E-mail revolution over the years world wide. And one which they would have never in their wildest dreams predicted back in 1986 into gaining supremacy in all of this! 🍷
Honestly, be glad you missed it. I had to live through these years and as you can see, the tech barely hung together! The 80s was a fun time for innovation, but far too much of it was half-baked, unreliable or just not ready. It made for a lot of disappointment. With me being a technophile, by about 1990 it was becoming obvious that the world we have today was going to come about eventually, with a computer on every desk, and handheld minicomputers that would make videocalls, play music and show films. etc. But I wanted it all then! I didn't want to have to wait to see it slowly come together piece by piece! I'd love to grow up now and just have it all ready in front of me. Mind you, every now and then, I still get a little thrill from using today's computers. The childhood me, wakes up inside me and shouts "Oh my god we're living in the future!!!" If you're into old computer tech documentaries. I can massively recommend one called "Hyperland" made by the BBC in 1990, presented by the late great scifi author Douglas Adams. It attempted to predict what a future interconnected world of computers would look like, and in many cases, the predictions are pretty close to reality! There's a copy of it on youtube: th-cam.com/video/1iAJPoc23-M/w-d-xo.html
Sadly, technological advances are often misused for nefarious purposes! ... For example (and admittedly a little more serious than email viruses) splitting the atom, led to Atomic Bombs, and the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
IDK about now but there used to be a time when people received loads of trash mail and ads through normal mail, so e-mails replaced that making it much cheaper and faster to send them.
I worked in the market as a broker and we were using Email. But at the time we were told not to use email confirmation for a quote or cover confirmation as it wasn’t a tested legally binding form of communication. So to cancel a policy or make a change, you had to send a Telex. Happy days!
I was 16 in '86 and never heard of e mail yet. I do recall having computer classes in HS around this time, but it was so boring because it was all about DOS programs and floppy disks and I didn't understand any of it. It wouldn't be until spring of '92 that I bought my first home computer that had Prodigy which was a pre-AOL type internet service where I discovered all the fun stuff like shopping online, message boards, chat rooms, e mail etc and it was a whole new world!
Our maths teacher had a CPM Z80 based computer with 8" floppy disc drives. We had BBC model A & B's and a few Acorn Electron's and RML 380z and 480z's. The joys of spending 3.95 on a magazine full of BASIC games to type in during lunch times and the odd after school session.
9:35 - now I just point my communicator at it, and it shows my chosen language in AR. I used to love this stuff as a youngster in the 80's, but my god, I'm glad we've moved on.
0:24 The legendary Fred Harris from the Playschool outtake "I cannot work with these amateurs!!" (look it up). Also he would have dropped his bacon sandwich back then if you'd told him that EA Games had a 3 Gig patch for their latest triple A shooter download !!
The company I worked for (Commercial Union) implemented email as the primary comms system internally and externally in 1983. It's been around for a long time.
“One Per Desk” is essentially a luxury that was disappearing by the time I started my career. I had a computer on my desk in only a couple of internships. Since then, it’s been work laptops you open up at any desk you can find.
Email without internet! Just dial up the person’s computer directly! I never even knew that was a thing. I remember BBSes, and how you could leave messages through them.
That still required the internet though, what people consider the internet today is actually the web. The internet is the backbone of interlinked hardware going as far back as the late 60's while the web is the mass of tangled software that has ran on it since 1991.
@@krashd Sure, but if you’re direct dialling another computer, is that the internet? There’s no packet switched routing, you’re not dialling an ISP, you’re not using DNS.
@@scaredyfish I don't think you direct dialed. You dialed a BBS service that routed it to other subscribers. I believe that's what retrospectively became termed as POP2 (POP1 being peer-to-peer, i.e. direct, POP2 being routed by a BBS server over ARPANET and POP3 being SMTP/MAPI over IP).
@@markboulton954 The BBS service was the central computer which users connected to if they wanted to see their messages whether on the public boards or via private email. It was peer-to-peer between the user and the System Operator or Sysop. Things changed when BBSes merged to become part of larger networks such as DOVE-NET and FIDO-NET.
I had no idea emails existed the same year I was born!! I for one did not have a computer and internet access until 2000 hahaha and it wasn't even that massive where I live (Chile). Amazing video
they aren't actually talking about internet email, there were lots of types of email systems. A popular one on BBS 's was fidonet. If you were lucky and could get access you could get email and usenet access on the internet though. For quite a while lots of companies ran their own private networks and private email systems. I had a play on the internet in the late 80s, and then got a dial up connection in 1990. Was a great time to be on the internet!
Some people think me old fashioned, but this does look like the future, its one of those things I really hope takes off, can't wait to use this type of system and hope it does not cost too much! .S
electronic mail systems have been about since the late 1960s when they were used in the US by government departments, Nasa and a handful of top universities. But this is still an amazing insight into the state of emailing in the mid 1980s. I know author Arthur C Clarke (who lived in Sri Lanka) used an early email system in 1983/84 when he was asked by director Peter Hyams (in Hollywood) to help him adapt his novel '2010' into a screenplay for the movie version so i'm guessing the system looked something like what we see here.
The lead character (Roy Scheider) in the movie *2010* is at one point sitting on the beach working on his laptop - it looked like a laptop I used in the late 80ies (no wi-fi or internet as we know it now) and at one point a silent white aerodynamic electric car glided by! It was pretty much spot on...! *2010* premiered in 1982 and was a huge production which took a couple of years to make. But except for that scene shot on the beach - *2010* was a child of the 80ies. The spacecraft that took the crew to Jupiter was only close to realistic when it came to the rocket engines! But Arthur C. Clarke who was one of the consultants on the movie developed communication satellites and radar when he wasn't writing novels so he knew a bit about rockets. He actually wrote *2010* so he was the man for the job!
@@doriangray_1999 I've seen that film and I noticed that too. It's a prototype Apple Mac laptop that they lent the film. Very advanced for 1983 (when the movie was filmed). There's an interesting bit of info on it in the 'trivia' section of the 2010 entry on IMDB if you want to know more.
Here in Canada in early nineties, I remember setting up a large retail store to send cash register data to the head office about 100 KM away. There were days spent negotiating commercial data line rates and dedicated phone lines. Such things were complicated and expensive without the public Internet.
I never used email till about 96, didn't know about it even, though I was interested always in tech, so I'm surprised it was in existence in its rudimentary form 11 years earlier. Our PCs at school certainly didn't have any of this in the early 90s, would have been very handy for sending messages instead of risking passing notes or talking lol.
It is crazy how far back email actually goes. If I remember right it took on something resembling its modern form around 1973ish. I remember one of the oft told factoids about Elizabeth II was that she was the world's first head of state to send an email back in 1976. Like yourself I didn't get an email address until the mid 90s which I signed up for with the school's only internet connected PC. I'd known email was a thing as a friend had net access and had told me how to get an account. Thing was, they were the only person I knew who had email so there wasn't much point having it for a long time! Weird to think how dealing with emails went over time from being a cool novelty to a dreary part of the daily grind!
I thought that email started around 1988 or 89, so I was a few years out and pretty surprised! For reference, the World Wide Web (the bit of the internet that you see when using a web browser) went live in 1991. That was still early days though. I started to use the internet in 1998 (aged 20) and it was pretty mainstream by then
Nice blast from the past! Though Social Media, snowballed being the qunessential ultimate evil born of the internet / E-mail revolution over the years world wide. And one which they would have never in their wildest dreams predicted back in 1986 into gaining supremacy in all of this! 🍷
The U.S. Post Office made reference to E Mail in 1979. It wasn't until 1981 though when CompuServe started using the term email that it started becoming well know and used and the rest is history.
Remote mail box server services were still in operation for businesses to manage stock inventory across large companies in both the USA and UK until the late 90's. I used to work for a phone support company that managed BT E-mailbox services in 1998 for most high street shops stock control. AoL, Yahoo, Hotmail and standalone email programs like Eudora or Outlook put paid to such services with free data exchange.
Thank goodness unlimited local calls were included in the base price where I lived in the U.S. I remember buying BBS magazines looking for a local number to connect to FiDo Net and other BBS servers.
@@andymerrett Hey, that's almost literature! Don't you try to pull up the tone, we're geeks around here we only read systems guides, and you won't find that kind of language in RSTS or PDP manual set...
There were several other reasons why E-Mail didn't take off until the Mid-1990's. It was extremely complicated to use in the 1980's for anyone without a Computer Science 🔭 Degree. Also, you had to know at least one other person who had an E-Mail address, which almost no one had. Most People, who went online in the 1908's like myself, used Bulletin Board Services (BBS) To chat & talk to strangers. It didn't take off in the US until the Mid-90's when America Online came out & gave every person who Purchased Dial Up Internet an AOL Address. I was starting out in my Career as a Sales Rep in 1998 & even Business Customers of mine were telling me to use FAX instead until 1999, when it rapidly started changing. In 1998 I probably only sent & received about 20 total emails to Customers that year.
"I'm taking that that gibberish is actually saying 'it has been sent' - it's a brilliant of British Telecom Gold and the quality of the lines we get" - that line is gold...
Atari ST - note the shape of the case. Also, from 9:09 you can see the Atari logo as part of the software near the top left of his screen. That Old Guy.
I forgot about the old 'One Per Desk' with its microdrives (never knew they were actually used by someone !). I love how the BBC continued to use the term 'micro' to describe home/personal computers of the time. I never heard the term used anywhere else except in my CSE Computing exam (1987) where we were expected to know the difference between 'Mainframe', 'Mini' and 'Micro' computers. Some things never change - school qualifications in computing were as obscure and irrelevant then as they are now.
It wasn't until you enrolled in a Rodney Trotter type night class for a 'Diploma in Computerisation' that you obtained anything worthwhile and could add 'DiC' after your name lol
One of my computer operators had a BT Tonto (rebranded One Per Desk) and ISTR they were based on the Sinclair QL - hence the micro(tape)drives. ICL used them for the integrated telephony , WP & email on reception desks etc. I remember seeing a lot of them when on training courses at ICL-Windsor & ICL-Manchester.
@@DavidPaulMorgan Worked at ICL's PC Business Centre in Bracknell (BRA04) for my Industrial Training Year ('86-'87) as part of an ICL sponsored degree at The City University in London. If my memory serves me correct, a senior ICL technical manager, John Panter, worked on the micro-drives and fixed a whole of load of issues with them that meant they could go into production both on the ICL OPD and the Sinclair QL. I worked on ICL's first IBM/MS-DOS/Windows compatible AT clone, the ICL Professional Work Station (ICL PWS) integrating non-ICL data communication products i.e. Hayes modems, IBM broadband & baseband LANs, IBM's Token-Ring LAN (LU6.2), 3Com networking and first versions of Novell's Netware. Great times and put me on the road to a 25+ year career in in IT.
That is just so true . The email maybe your written transmission , but whether anyone bothers to read it is another thing ! Receivers miss your email amongst the spam and round robins that flood through . Government is particularly dreadful to work within and it's departmental spam .
Ah, I miss Fred Harris. TV presenters were so reassuringly calm, intelligent, and dignified back then, and the future seemed so bright. What went wrong?
Its fascinating to hear at the end of the video about some kind of very early forerunner to Google Translate where you email text to an actual human translator who sends the translated text back to you for a price.
In the late 80's the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were leaps and bounds ahead of other computers, even PCs and Apple Macs. Those two ruled the roost until the 90's when Windows 3 showed that PCs were the future and micro computers were the past.
hey BBC can we get the other video please @9:15 where they went ‘round the city with the analog radiowave van & picked up data?? that sounds retro-awesome
@Jack Warner Quite possibly but as we know it was technologically impossible to carry out such a feat. There was no way those detector vans worked... Good tv campaign though.
@Jack Warner @9:15 they talk about it briefly but i paused the clip & read the article on-screen and it says they eavesdropped on financial firms in the city with £200 equipment in a van and got all kinds of stuff sent in the open
Oh dear, as someone that jumped on the internet at its birth, and has used email in one form or another for 40 years, and as a specialist tax accountant, it's sad testament that email now gets ignored and delayed by Government as much as traditional "snail mail" does. I'm eagerly awaiting quantum mail so maybe Gvt will respond quickly and efficiently, but I'm not holding my breath,.
This type of email setup sounds similar to what I used that year with a Commodore 128 - QuantumLink... later to become America On Line (AOL). It wasn't Internet-based email, but the next best thing at the time.
As an American I give massive Props to The UK for taking the lead in E-Mail. So I was an excited kid in the 1980's that had to always have the latest Tech. However, I didn't go Online until 1988, when I had a Commodore 64 & Purchased my 1st Modem from a Guy at School in The Computer 🖥️ Club. The Reason that Britain was ahead, was because of the BBC MICRO ! It was the World's 1st Mass Produced Computer that came with a Modem already.
I'm from 1977 , i love electronic from my childhood , i remember connected a speaker with my casio time watch just for ear the "bip bip" from the speaker haha i was 7 ...started to learn informatic in 1990 with comodore 64 and other Atari st (with soundcard dolby and REAL graphic card ^^ ) , today i write this com from a good coputer tower very powerful but the sound is from 2 speakers 1974 and my best friend gived me some LP (for turntable) , i love to listen the band "modern talking" from this LP , in the same time i have all on MP3...that's funny to know , in 1986 this "reto tech" was the high tec on his time ! exactly like today ! 2022 08 16 , peoples of 2042 08 16 i'm sure for they , our technolgie is also "Vintage ,old , retro " ! PS : i'm electrician at work but also electronician and dj , love electronic music , i watch "dr who" ,when you know the music generic from 1963 (by Delia Derbishire) was made with the best electronic coponment of the 60s era , band tape , sound by sound , a compressor by sound , cutin and pastin band and aband and band ...stynchronise ,all b yhand no computer help...RESPECT ^^
It's a shame this didn't really take off, it could have changed the world as we know it! We could have made a program to share our photos and contact friends, and given it a name like face book or something similar, it could have been amazing
fascinating...... of course for your 1990 travel to praha, warszawa you could forget that even for austrua and germany that was alien technology.....love that video ... in 2000 the internet started in austria forbroader range ( well in the warsznaw pact they would have arrested you as a spy in 1986 .....where shortwave was the gate to the world....
It's sad to think that 15 years of brain dead backwards thinking by British Telecom were ahead for internet enthusiasts in the UK (living outside of Hull, anyway).. before a reasonable way to stay connected to the internet without horrendous phonebills would finally be on our shores. What a bottleneck for technology!
This youtube channel is probably the ONLY outlet of the BBC that understands its target audience. Maybe just after Radio 4...
Well BBC one does kinda have to appeal to everyone.
It's almost as if all of the other BBC video channels, radio stations and websites cater to a wide audience...
They couldn’t make that today. BBC is now only aimed at woke leftie morons. Utter bias with the sole aim of being woke. License needs to be scrapped.
I'm having a hard time understanding the depth of self centred naïveté in this comment
When they mentioned schools, I remember back in 1986/7 a friend at school was notified that he'd received a message from an old friend from another school on the library computer.
What a lovely view from her office window.
What a nice comment.
I never heard of email til about 1995 so it's weird seeing it being talked about a decade earlier.
spot on!
Had you heard of BBS or IRC?
@@TinLeadHammer NIH
I also didn’t know about email and internet until the mid nineties 🤔
It was mostly an academia and business thing in the 80s. Regular people didn't really become aware until the WWW became a thing, and people got online with the early ISPs. I was using multi user computer systems in the mid 80s, (DEC-20, VAX) and had access to email over JANET (Joint Academic NETwork), but it was to friends who were also in academia. Later in the 90s, working at a different Uni we were using Internet Protocols and email formats we are familiar with today, rather than the old JANET CBS format.
Fascinating to watch with the benefit of almost 40 years hindsight. Like many commenting here I first heard about e mail in the mid 1990s which means that being 27 years old at the time of this broadcast I like many others was guilty of being asleep at the IT wheel. But notice how even the experts hadn't grasped the huge implications of what was about to happen: " rival the telephone by 1995"? My God .....
I love the story of Donald Knuth (famous computer scientist), who _stopped_ using email in 1990, and hasn't used it since. At that point he had used it since 1975 and commented that "it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime"
They couldn't grasp what would happen because the internet didn't exist at this point. Some might argue now that ARPANET already existed at the time but that's not the internet. Many didn't know about email before the internet so this is quite normal but comparing this to not knowing about something that didn't exist is a bit of a stretch.
What's a telephone, again?
sent my first email in 1996, amazed now, I thought I was doing something new
It didn't actually end up rivalling it really. Not at all. Which is why we are all walking about with telephones pressed to our ears a great deal of the time... 😜
I'm old school too...I still use Hotmail.
Damn right
I bet you still access your internet via AOL
welcome to the club i still use hotmail too! 🐱👍🏿
Me too - signed up in 1999 and use the same email address to this day.
I use pigeons …
"...for some reason he looked different from the pics he emailed."
And so catfishing was born.
meowmeow
It’s probably just because the photo was 4 colours and about 50 pixels.
First question to ask any Tinder date on the phone: what decade of the 20th century was your photo taken?
1986: The Joy of E-MAIL | Micro Live | Retro Tech | BBC Archive 0949am 17.10.24 i surmise the chap who sent the terribly worded email worked for the guardian..... and tried to get the legend: numkl puckuchul ftumsch into the oxford english dictionary.
I didn't know email was around as early as this. I was 11 in 1986. I don't remember coming across it until the mid 90's, when the first of my friends had access to it at home.
What's shown here is not actually what would be classed as email today. It's more like teletext.
@@HOLLASOUNDS It certainly is email, just not on the interrnet.
SMTP, the same email protocol that is used today first was published in 1980. ARPANET, the Internet's precursor, had email from around 1971, in fact the use of username@hostname address format for email goes back to 1971. Email had been actively used for around 15 years before this programme was filmed.
@@FlightEagle
That's interesting. As a young woman I worked for a company with international clients and sent mail by Telex. It was electronic but was it the email we understand today?
I was still on the other side somewhere waiting for my conception.
You would never believe this show was broadcast live
Say whaaat?
@@beforedrrdpr the show was originally broadcast live dummy
Live ? No way hmmm
Nice blast from the past! Though Social Media, snowballed being the qunessential ultimate evil born of the internet / E-mail revolution over the years world wide. And one which they would have never in their wildest dreams predicted back in 1986 into gaining supremacy in all of this! 🍷
It wasn't live!! Just called that.
I really can't see this catching on or happen in our lifetime
A perfect exposition of the difference between British and US computers…
I love old tech videos from before I was born and when i was not yet old enough to remember (before 2000). It’s so foreign yet families.
I was 7 years old in 1986. It was a fantastic time, very optimistic and cheerful, but also mysterious.
Honestly, be glad you missed it. I had to live through these years and as you can see, the tech barely hung together! The 80s was a fun time for innovation, but far too much of it was half-baked, unreliable or just not ready. It made for a lot of disappointment.
With me being a technophile, by about 1990 it was becoming obvious that the world we have today was going to come about eventually, with a computer on every desk, and handheld minicomputers that would make videocalls, play music and show films. etc. But I wanted it all then! I didn't want to have to wait to see it slowly come together piece by piece! I'd love to grow up now and just have it all ready in front of me.
Mind you, every now and then, I still get a little thrill from using today's computers. The childhood me, wakes up inside me and shouts "Oh my god we're living in the future!!!"
If you're into old computer tech documentaries. I can massively recommend one called "Hyperland" made by the BBC in 1990, presented by the late great scifi author Douglas Adams. It attempted to predict what a future interconnected world of computers would look like, and in many cases, the predictions are pretty close to reality! There's a copy of it on youtube: th-cam.com/video/1iAJPoc23-M/w-d-xo.html
@@CountScarlioni "Oh my god we're living in the future!!!" yesss very good phrase
Great report. Little did they know that the email system would later get flooded by spam, viruses, begging emails and scams.
hello saire im from nigeria, you have won a 1million USD lottery from your youtube comment, please email me back to collect your praize!
Sadly, technological advances are often misused for nefarious purposes! ... For example (and admittedly a little more serious than email viruses) splitting the atom, led to Atomic Bombs, and the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
IDK about now but there used to be a time when people received loads of trash mail and ads through normal mail, so e-mails replaced that making it much cheaper and faster to send them.
Sent my first email at 16 in 1987 at a LLoyds broker. I printed it out and still have it somewhere.
I worked in the market as a broker and we were using Email. But at the time we were told not to use email confirmation for a quote or cover confirmation as it wasn’t a tested legally binding form of communication. So to cancel a policy or make a change, you had to send a Telex. Happy days!
I was 16 in '86 and never heard of e mail yet. I do recall having computer classes in HS around this time, but it was so boring because it was all about DOS programs and floppy disks and I didn't understand any of it.
It wouldn't be until spring of '92 that I bought my first home computer that had Prodigy which was a pre-AOL type internet service where I discovered all the fun stuff like shopping online, message boards, chat rooms, e mail etc and it was a whole new world!
Oh chat rooms make me remember Yahoo Messenger, I miss it so very much! 😔
Our maths teacher had a CPM Z80 based computer with 8" floppy disc drives. We had BBC model A & B's and a few Acorn Electron's and RML 380z and 480z's. The joys of spending 3.95 on a magazine full of BASIC games to type in during lunch times and the odd after school session.
I wouldn't be alive if email didn't exist! My parents met online in the mid-90s
9:35 - now I just point my communicator at it, and it shows my chosen language in AR. I used to love this stuff as a youngster in the 80's, but my god, I'm glad we've moved on.
5:50 He chats like people today and on feature phones - 'OK 4 me' 🤣🤣🤣
0:24 The legendary Fred Harris from the Playschool outtake "I cannot work with these amateurs!!" (look it up). Also he would have dropped his bacon sandwich back then if you'd told him that EA Games had a 3 Gig patch for their latest triple A shooter download !!
I looked it up, god that was funny. "Fred Harris Playschool" will produce the video in YT search. Worth it.
Wow..how far we come!..I remember this back when I was a kid...I would loved to show my younger self the technology we have now..
The company I worked for (Commercial Union) implemented email as the primary comms system internally and externally in 1983. It's been around for a long time.
“One Per Desk” is essentially a luxury that was disappearing by the time I started my career. I had a computer on my desk in only a couple of internships. Since then, it’s been work laptops you open up at any desk you can find.
Email without internet! Just dial up the person’s computer directly!
I never even knew that was a thing. I remember BBSes, and how you could leave messages through them.
That still required the internet though, what people consider the internet today is actually the web. The internet is the backbone of interlinked hardware going as far back as the late 60's while the web is the mass of tangled software that has ran on it since 1991.
@@krashd Sure, but if you’re direct dialling another computer, is that the internet? There’s no packet switched routing, you’re not dialling an ISP, you’re not using DNS.
@@scaredyfish I don't think you direct dialed. You dialed a BBS service that routed it to other subscribers. I believe that's what retrospectively became termed as POP2 (POP1 being peer-to-peer, i.e. direct, POP2 being routed by a BBS server over ARPANET and POP3 being SMTP/MAPI over IP).
@@scaredyfish Not the internet, but similar to the way fax machines still work today. Just a direct call between phone lines
@@markboulton954 The BBS service was the central computer which users connected to if they wanted to see their messages whether on the public boards or via private email. It was peer-to-peer between the user and the System Operator or Sysop. Things changed when BBSes merged to become part of larger networks such as DOVE-NET and FIDO-NET.
They were talking about the new Era with excitement and were are watching back their Era with curiosity lol
I had no idea emails existed the same year I was born!! I for one did not have a computer and internet access until 2000 hahaha and it wasn't even that massive where I live (Chile). Amazing video
It was around in the 1970s in American universities.
they aren't actually talking about internet email, there were lots of types of email systems. A popular one on BBS 's was fidonet. If you were lucky and could get access you could get email and usenet access on the internet though. For quite a while lots of companies ran their own private networks and private email systems. I had a play on the internet in the late 80s, and then got a dial up connection in 1990. Was a great time to be on the internet!
Omg! another chilean! hi!
i now know how a modem works! i love these programmes, takes you back to how it started and explains it perfectly
Some people think me old fashioned, but this does look like the future, its one of those things I really hope takes off, can't wait to use this type of system and hope it does not cost too much! .S
Most TV in the 1980s had the same atmosphere as this show. I loved watching at that time when I was at primary school.
electronic mail systems have been about since the late 1960s when they were used in the US by government departments, Nasa and a handful of top universities. But this is still an amazing insight into the state of emailing in the mid 1980s. I know author Arthur C Clarke (who lived in Sri Lanka) used an early email system in 1983/84 when he was asked by director Peter Hyams (in Hollywood) to help him adapt his novel '2010' into a screenplay for the movie version so i'm guessing the system looked something like what we see here.
The lead character (Roy Scheider) in the movie *2010* is at one point sitting on the beach working on his laptop - it looked like a laptop I used in the late 80ies (no wi-fi or internet as we know it now) and at one point a silent white aerodynamic electric car glided by! It was pretty much spot on...! *2010* premiered in 1982 and was a huge production which took a couple of years to make. But except for that scene shot on the beach - *2010* was a child of the 80ies. The spacecraft that took the crew to Jupiter was only close to realistic when it came to the rocket engines! But Arthur C. Clarke who was one of the consultants on the movie developed communication satellites and radar when he wasn't writing novels so he knew a bit about rockets. He actually wrote *2010* so he was the man for the job!
@@doriangray_1999 I've seen that film and I noticed that too. It's a prototype Apple Mac laptop that they lent the film. Very advanced for 1983 (when the movie was filmed). There's an interesting bit of info on it in the 'trivia' section of the 2010 entry on IMDB if you want to know more.
That's right y'all. BT charged 15p/minute, or 9 pounds per hour in 1986 to be connected to such a system. Which would be 28.10 pounds per hour today.
Here in Canada in early nineties, I remember setting up a large retail store to send cash register data to the head office about 100 KM away. There were days spent negotiating commercial data line rates and dedicated phone lines. Such things were complicated and expensive without the public Internet.
And spam got invented just about 5 minutes later ...
I never used email till about 96, didn't know about it even, though I was interested always in tech, so I'm surprised it was in existence in its rudimentary form 11 years earlier. Our PCs at school certainly didn't have any of this in the early 90s, would have been very handy for sending messages instead of risking passing notes or talking lol.
It is crazy how far back email actually goes. If I remember right it took on something resembling its modern form around 1973ish. I remember one of the oft told factoids about Elizabeth II was that she was the world's first head of state to send an email back in 1976.
Like yourself I didn't get an email address until the mid 90s which I signed up for with the school's only internet connected PC. I'd known email was a thing as a friend had net access and had told me how to get an account. Thing was, they were the only person I knew who had email so there wasn't much point having it for a long time!
Weird to think how dealing with emails went over time from being a cool novelty to a dreary part of the daily grind!
I thought that email started around 1988 or 89, so I was a few years out and pretty surprised! For reference, the World Wide Web (the bit of the internet that you see when using a web browser) went live in 1991. That was still early days though. I started to use the internet in 1998 (aged 20) and it was pretty mainstream by then
It was around in the 1970s in American universities.
Nice blast from the past! Though Social Media, snowballed being the qunessential ultimate evil born of the internet / E-mail revolution over the years world wide. And one which they would have never in their wildest dreams predicted back in 1986 into gaining supremacy in all of this! 🍷
@@ajs41yes even Steve Jobs saw networked Xerox Altos networked with e-mail capability. There is even a demo video from 1980 that shows e-mail.
The U.S. Post Office made reference to E Mail in 1979. It wasn't until 1981 though when CompuServe started using the term email that it started becoming well know and used and the rest is history.
What a time they lived in!
Shes busy belittling the phone when the one thing you needed to connect to the net back then and for years afterwards was a phone!
Remote mail box server services were still in operation for businesses to manage stock inventory across large companies in both the USA and UK until the late 90's. I used to work for a phone support company that managed BT E-mailbox services in 1998 for most high street shops stock control. AoL, Yahoo, Hotmail and standalone email programs like Eudora or Outlook put paid to such services with free data exchange.
I like the idea at about 01:40 that you just accept that messages out of hours will be read at the start of working hours.
This is how an ideal work environment should be, never read work emails or messages outside working hours.
I remember running a BBS back in the day and using FidoNet as the "email" system, before the WWW took off
Thank goodness unlimited local calls were included in the base price where I lived in the U.S.
I remember buying BBS magazines looking for a local number to connect to FiDo Net and other BBS servers.
Fred is a pro. Great clip.
Hold on, what happened to Kitty's new relationship? I was invested in this story and we never got to know how it ended?
Lol ikr what an outrage to leave is hanging like this 😅
@@andymerrett Hey, that's almost literature! Don't you try to pull up the tone, we're geeks around here we only read systems guides, and you won't find that kind of language in RSTS or PDP manual set...
Hopefully not a scammer
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Cowlishaw they were married and are still married!
@ghost mall see my previous comment, they're still together and yes both academics 🙂
The messing about with the email made my head hurt.
There were several other reasons why E-Mail didn't take off until the Mid-1990's. It was extremely complicated to use in the 1980's for anyone without a Computer Science 🔭 Degree. Also, you had to know at least one other person who had an E-Mail address, which almost no one had. Most People, who went online in the 1908's like myself, used Bulletin Board Services (BBS) To chat & talk to strangers. It didn't take off in the US until the Mid-90's when America Online came out & gave every person who Purchased Dial Up Internet an AOL Address.
I was starting out in my Career as a Sales Rep in 1998 & even Business Customers of mine were telling me to use FAX instead until 1999, when it rapidly started changing. In 1998 I probably only sent & received about 20 total emails to Customers that year.
"I'm taking that that gibberish is actually saying 'it has been sent' - it's a brilliant of British Telecom Gold and the quality of the lines we get" - that line is gold...
Great BBC program as tomorrow's world
Electronic mail you say? This'll never take off!
Kitteridge is typing on an IBM Model F AT keyboard. I hope she hung on to it, as they're worth a fortune now.
These retro tech archive videos are amazing!!. At minute 8:00, I think the reporter used a amiga commodore 500 computer I would say.
Atari ST - note the shape of the case. Also, from 9:09 you can see the Atari logo as part of the software near the top left of his screen.
That Old Guy.
The amount of money email saved me on stamps and phone calls was a lot of money, a great Idea
Except your broadband bill is probably pretty high.
@@ajs41 £32 a month
I forgot about the old 'One Per Desk' with its microdrives (never knew they were actually used by someone !). I love how the BBC continued to use the term 'micro' to describe home/personal computers of the time. I never heard the term used anywhere else except in my CSE Computing exam (1987) where we were expected to know the difference between 'Mainframe', 'Mini' and 'Micro' computers. Some things never change - school qualifications in computing were as obscure and irrelevant then as they are now.
It wasn't until you enrolled in a Rodney Trotter type night class for a 'Diploma in Computerisation' that you obtained anything worthwhile and could add 'DiC' after your name lol
One of my computer operators had a BT Tonto (rebranded One Per Desk) and ISTR they were based on the Sinclair QL - hence the micro(tape)drives. ICL used them for the integrated telephony , WP & email on reception desks etc. I remember seeing a lot of them when on training courses at ICL-Windsor & ICL-Manchester.
@@this_is_a_tiny_town to go under your T.i.T letterheaded paper lmao...long live David jason an nick Lyndhurst
@@DavidPaulMorgan Worked at ICL's PC Business Centre in Bracknell (BRA04) for my Industrial Training Year ('86-'87) as part of an ICL sponsored degree at The City University in London. If my memory serves me correct, a senior ICL technical manager, John Panter, worked on the micro-drives and fixed a whole of load of issues with them that meant they could go into production both on the ICL OPD and the Sinclair QL. I worked on ICL's first IBM/MS-DOS/Windows compatible AT clone, the ICL Professional Work Station (ICL PWS) integrating non-ICL data communication products i.e. Hayes modems, IBM broadband & baseband LANs, IBM's Token-Ring LAN (LU6.2), 3Com networking and first versions of Novell's Netware. Great times and put me on the road to a 25+ year career in in IT.
Well "micro" was quite an established term in the UK.
The notion was used to include all computers, not only those of IBM standard.
Wow, a brave new world! Yet we still call on the phone to ask did you get my email ☺
That is just so true . The email maybe your written transmission , but whether anyone bothers to read it is another thing ! Receivers miss your email amongst the spam and round robins that flood through . Government is particularly dreadful to work within and it's departmental spam .
Yet it fairly rare an email will make a sale; it’s the rapport and relationship of actually talking to your customer that does.
Fred was ready for cricket at any point.
Think of the advertising possibilities!
Ah, I miss Fred Harris. TV presenters were so reassuringly calm, intelligent, and dignified back then, and the future seemed so bright. What went wrong?
My friend married a modem in 1986. Bucks Fizz were at the wedding, honeymoon was on the Falkland Islands.
How old this feels.....
No error detection/correction on the modem line!
Its fascinating to hear at the end of the video about some kind of very early forerunner to Google Translate where you email text to an actual human translator who sends the translated text back to you for a price.
Wow, am I ever glad to see that I'm not alone with these anomalous.
Good grief was the atari ui so much better than the others they showed.
In the late 80's the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were leaps and bounds ahead of other computers, even PCs and Apple Macs. Those two ruled the roost until the 90's when Windows 3 showed that PCs were the future and micro computers were the past.
I like the mention of translation service in the end. :D
Line noise, 8-bit style. Before error-checking packet switching became commonplace.
Great show
hey BBC can we get the other video please @9:15 where they went ‘round the city with the analog radiowave van & picked up data?? that sounds retro-awesome
@Jack Warner Quite possibly but as we know it was technologically impossible to carry out such a feat. There was no way those detector vans worked... Good tv campaign though.
@Jack Warner @9:15 they talk about it briefly but i paused the clip & read the article on-screen and it says they eavesdropped on financial firms in the city with £200 equipment in a van and got all kinds of stuff sent in the open
@@gallitron7803 article at @9:15 says it worked. this was the 80s they sent stuff analog and unencrypted 🙂
Oh dear, as someone that jumped on the internet at its birth, and has used email in one form or another for 40 years, and as a specialist tax accountant, it's sad testament that email now gets ignored and delayed by Government as much as traditional "snail mail" does. I'm eagerly awaiting quantum mail so maybe Gvt will respond quickly and efficiently, but I'm not holding my breath,.
"My typing cannot possibly be that bad" LOL 😂
It's so funny seeing internet communication without TCP/checksums
Are we to assume that Micheal was not the most handsome of chaps…
all bbc archive is history
I’d forgotten that Fred Harris of The Burkiss Way fame was on this programme. It’s strange to watch him being serious.
This type of email setup sounds similar to what I used that year with a Commodore 128 - QuantumLink... later to become America On Line (AOL). It wasn't Internet-based email, but the next best thing at the time.
I wonder what happened to all those ICL OPD's ? Which cost thousands to buy back in the day.
Brilliant
Oh so that's why Sheldon was using email in his computer in young Sheldon that was the same year as this..
World to fast for me 2024
Back to the future
1960 ❤
Wow beautiful England ❤back then
Michael is a very lucky man...
I remember having a pen pal many many years ago, using regular mail not email!
I've got a feeling that this "email " thing will never take off
Things were mighty expensive for those early adapters.
"Electronic Mail" indeed :)
As an American I give massive Props to The UK for taking the lead in E-Mail. So I was an excited kid in the 1980's that had to always have the latest Tech. However, I didn't go Online until 1988, when I had a Commodore 64 & Purchased my 1st Modem from a Guy at School in The Computer 🖥️ Club.
The Reason that Britain was ahead, was because of the BBC MICRO ! It was the World's 1st Mass Produced Computer that came with a Modem already.
1986: The Joy of Email
2022: The Dread of Email(SPAM)
I'm from 1977 , i love electronic from my childhood , i remember connected a speaker with my casio time watch just for ear the "bip bip" from the speaker haha i was 7 ...started to learn informatic in 1990 with comodore 64 and other Atari st (with soundcard dolby and REAL graphic card ^^ ) , today i write this com from a good coputer tower very powerful but the sound is from 2 speakers 1974 and my best friend gived me some LP (for turntable) , i love to listen the band "modern talking" from this LP , in the same time i have all on MP3...that's funny to know , in 1986 this "reto tech" was the high tec on his time ! exactly like today ! 2022 08 16 , peoples of 2042 08 16 i'm sure for they , our technolgie is also "Vintage ,old , retro " !
PS : i'm electrician at work but also electronician and dj , love electronic music , i watch "dr who" ,when you know the music generic from 1963 (by Delia Derbishire) was made with the best electronic coponment of the 60s era , band tape , sound by sound , a compressor by sound , cutin and pastin band and aband and band ...stynchronise ,all b yhand no computer help...RESPECT ^^
It'll never catch on.
nope. just like netflix. just like mp3s.
It's a shame this didn't really take off, it could have changed the world as we know it! We could have made a program to share our photos and contact friends, and given it a name like face book or something similar, it could have been amazing
😂
🤣
Cant wait!
Anyone else notice the telephone handset was inserted into the coupler backwards?
I did...
...after reading your comment.
0:00 She's talking about Michael Myers from the Halloween movies.
She got to know him so well that, she did not care what he looked like. Pity these superficial dating apps aren't like this.
1986: Ooh I love my electronic mail.
2024: God, I f**king hate email!!
fascinating...... of course for your 1990 travel to praha, warszawa you could forget that even for austrua and germany that was alien technology.....love that video ... in 2000 the internet started in austria forbroader range ( well in the warsznaw pact they would have arrested you as a spy in 1986 .....where shortwave was the gate to the world....
People have missed the plot, note the computer cursor letters, then 1986, and now, 2022.!
I've got my first email address 22 years after this program
Gosh haven't we come such a long way...
Jeremy Clarkson + Jay Leno
That Atari is pretty advanced for 1986.
It's sad to think that 15 years of brain dead backwards thinking by British Telecom were ahead for internet enthusiasts in the UK (living outside of Hull, anyway).. before a reasonable way to stay connected to the internet without horrendous phonebills would finally be on our shores. What a bottleneck for technology!
I lived in the midlands and had to dial up a service in London to get a connection all at long distance rates. I got some horrendous phone bills.
yep ghost mall matey - small world indeed :)
How did you get past The Guardian's paywall? Did your browser have an add-on?
It's funny to see a computer show where the host is older than 17.
@5:04 it is like he is narrating a sports match
Or like a video game live stream
Imagine today using a computer without mouse/touchpad ?!!