Prestel

~ the eulogy ~

i missed prestel. it was already a dying product when i first got a modem at home, by 1998 the uk had long since moved to dial-up internet and prestel was a brand most people had not thought about for years. the service was uk-only at the carrier layer and the terminals were sold through uk channels. turkey had nothing like it (close enough).

prestel launched in september '79 as a service of post office telecommunications, the telecoms arm of the british post office before it spun out as bt in 1981. it was the first public videotex service in the world, predating minitel in france by about a year as a national rollout. the idea was the same as videotex everywhere, you connected over a phone line into a central computer that served you pages of text and blocky graphics on a tv or a small terminal, at 1200 bits per second down and 75 bits per second up. you navigated by typing a page number, asterisk page number hash.

the post office had projected 1.5 million terminals by 1985. the actual peak was 95,500 in january '89, about one-sixteenth of the plan. the model worked for the small set of city users who used it for home banking, share prices, travel booking, telesoftware, and the small messaging system, but it never crossed over to a mass home audience. the rental cost of the terminal and the per-minute call charges were too high for the average household.

bt sold prestel in early '94 to a consortium that rebranded it new prestel and pivoted to b2b financial data. by mid-'96 that successor company had migrated to the web as the isp prestel on-line. the original consumer videotex service was effectively gone the day bt let go. of every transition step.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it actually worked ~

the original terminal was a modified colour tv with a small keypad and a 1200 bps modem in a box you sat under it. acorn and others sold dedicated terminals later, the bbc micro famously had a prestel mode you could buy as an add-on cartridge. the connection model was a free phone number into your nearest prestel computer centre. you logged in with a user id and a password, you typed a page number, the page rendered as character cells with a colour palette of about eight (close enough).

the billing model was per minute of connection plus a per-page surcharge for premium content. bt collected the money on the phone bill, the way france télécom did with minitel. that should have worked, but bt charged more per minute than france télécom did, and the terminals cost more, and the post office never gave them away the way the french state did. that combination is most of why prestel never reached minitel-scale numbers.

the page format was the magic, in those days. prestel used a frame format called cept-1 in its later years, with characters laid out in a 40-by-24 grid and the same blocky pseudo-graphics that ceefax used over the air. you could navigate by following menus, each page had a list of options numbered one to nine, you typed the number to drill in. you typed star nine star to go back. the rhythm was slow and patient, the way ceefax was slow and patient.

~ what it offered ~

the killer apps were home banking and travel. nottingham building society launched homelink on prestel in '83, the first home banking service in the world, you could check your balance and move money between accounts from a modified tatung tv. travel agents used prestel as a shared back office, viewdata terminals in high-street shops connected into prestel to book holidays and flights. by '85 most british travel agents had a prestel terminal on the counter. that b2b travel side actually outlived the consumer service.

citiservice from citicorp launched on prestel for share trading. micronet 800 was the famously good computer-enthusiast section, with telesoftware you could download for the bbc micro or sinclair spectrum at 1200 baud. by the late 1980s prestel was less a single product and more a set of niche b2b and enthusiast workflows running on a shared carrier (or whatever it was called).

~ the famous hack ~

i was not there for this, still. in '84 two journalists called robert schifreen and stephen gold guessed a default password on a development account on prestel. the credential was user 22222222 with password 1234. they used the access to read the duke of edinburgh's personal mailbox, which was on the system because the royal family had been given a complimentary account as a courtesy. they wrote it up for newspapers, they were prosecuted under the forgery and counterfeiting act, the prosecution failed because the law did not yet cover unauthorised computer access.

the case ran up to the house of lords and became the policy lever that drove the computer misuse act of 1990, the first uk law against unauthorised access to computers. prestel's biggest historical footprint outside the videotex story is that one hack and the law it produced.

~ the long tail ~

by the early 1990s prestel was carrying a small loyal user base of about 20,000 active accounts and bleeding money for bt. the web arrived in late '90 and started taking developer attention. bt looked at the cost and the trend, in '94 bt sold prestel to a consortium that focused on b2b financial data under the new prestel name. the consumer service was effectively dead from that point. by mid-'96 new prestel had migrated to the web as an isp. by the early 2000s even that brand was gone.

the prestel name now sits as a footnote in two stories. one is the videotex story, where it lost to minitel as the case study (france gave terminals away, britain charged for them, that single decision is most of what separates the two outcomes). the other is the computer misuse story, where the schifreen and gold case wrote uk computer law. neither story is what bt thought it was buying when it inherited the project in '81.

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