Telecom Gold

~ the last words ~

Dialcom was founded in Maryland in 1970 by Robert Ryan and sold the first commercial electronic mail service anyone ran as a business. It licensed its software into seventeen countries, and the national carrier in each of them put its own name on the front. In Britain that name was Telecom Gold, launched by British Telecom in 1982 and known to everyone who used it as BT Gold.

Underneath were Prime minicomputers running a customized PRIMOS. You dialed in with a modem and a terminal emulator, or came in over the PSS packet network on a local number if your company had that. Once inside you had a mailbox with a numeric address, and mail that went out to other Gold users, to Dialcom systems in other countries, to Sprint's mail service, and out through gateways into telex and fax. There was an OCR experiment for a while that let paper into the system.

That gateway list is the whole reason it existed. In 1982 a British firm wanting to reach another British firm electronically had telex, and telex was a machine in a room with a paper roll. Gold sat between the old network and the terminals appearing on desks, and BT charged accordingly. This was priced as a corporate service and bought by companies, not by people.

~ the record ~

~ the noticeboard ~

Somewhere in the 1980s the business tool grew a community, the way they all did. Gold had a noticeboard, addressed as noticebd, and a simple real-time chat facility, and a population of British users who found each other there and stayed. It is one of the earliest online communities in the country, formed inside an electronic mail product sold to employers, made of people using it on the company account.

A BBC film from 1986 shows the whole thing working: a Tandy Model 200 laptop, an acoustic coupler clamped onto a payphone handset, someone sending mail from a street. That was the pitch and it was a good one. The problem was that everything in the demonstration cost money per minute, and the person holding the laptop was doing it for work.

~ the fall ~

BT bought Dialcom from ITT in 1986, which meant it now owned the software it had been licensing. X.400 support arrived to keep the service standards-compliant, with a mail client for IBM PCs. Then the service was renamed Mailbox, and by the early nineties BT could see plainly that its customers wanted the internet.

It chose not to make Mailbox into an internet provider. Instead it launched BTnet as a separate business in 1994, and within two years Mailbox had stopped existing. Read one way that is a company failing to save its own product. Read another way it is a company recognizing that a closed mail network with gateways to telex has no path to becoming an open one, and that keeping the name would only slow down the thing that was going to replace it anyway.

~ how it ended ~

Fourteen years, from a national carrier selling mailboxes to a national carrier selling connectivity, and after 1996 nothing with the Gold name was left. The gateways to telex and fax outlived the service in other systems for a while, then stopped mattering. What remains is a fossil layer of British corporate correspondence in a proprietary format nobody archived.

My own first email address was free, arrived in 1998 or 1999 in a browser window, and belonged to a company on another continent that never sent me a bill. It never occurred to me to think of email as something with a price per message, because by the time I got here that battle had been settled and lost by everyone who charged. Telecom Gold is what the other answer looked like, and the reason it reads as strange now is that it was strange only in retrospect. For fourteen years, buying your mailbox from the phone company was the sensible option.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »