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... 😜
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! 🍷
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 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!
“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.
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.
@@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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vice City is set in the 80's when that sort of font and colour scheme was common, it's part of the retro style. Though seeing as GTA's creators have been known to pay homage to the shows they grew up with and they were originally a computer club in the early 80's I wouldn't be surprised if they were fans of Micro Live and based the Vice City logo on it.
Trust me... Telephone is much more futuristic than any email ever. All email and sms did is cause more and more issues between people. Voice brings the actual closeness.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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!
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!
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 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! 🍷
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: ua-cam.com/video/1iAJPoc23-M/v-deo.html
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.
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
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
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 .
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,.
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... 😜
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.
"...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?
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.
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 …
5:50 He chats like people today and on feature phones - 'OK 4 me' 🤣🤣🤣
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 wouldn't be alive if email didn't exist! My parents met online in the mid-90s
“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.
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.
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..
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 🙂
I love this stuff. Back when the BBC made great content.
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.
How old this feels.....
I really can't see this catching on or happen in our lifetime
"My typing cannot possibly be that bad" LOL 😂
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.
My friend married a modem in 1986. Bucks Fizz were at the wedding, honeymoon was on the Falkland Islands.
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.
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.
all bbc archive is history
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
1986: Ooh I love my electronic mail.
2024: God, I f**king hate email!!
Think of the advertising possibilities!
World to fast for me 2024
Back to the future
1960 ❤
Wow beautiful England ❤back then
Things were mighty expensive for those early adapters.
I've got a feeling that this "email " thing will never take off
Oh so that's why Sheldon was using email in his computer in young Sheldon that was the same year as this..
I HAVu Q BAD LYNE UTTHIS IS oK vOR MU
Sent from my iPhun
Great show
0:00 She's talking about Michael Myers from the Halloween movies.
Gosh haven't we come such a long way...
How did you get past The Guardian's paywall? Did your browser have an add-on?
Jeremy Clarkson + Jay Leno
It's the future! :-)
The worlds first catfish happening right in front of our eyes.
Brilliant
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.
That Atari is pretty advanced for 1986.
Cant wait!
@5:04 it is like he is narrating a sports match
Or like a video game live stream
I don't understand how this guy typed what he did, and it meant actual English back to David.
JOy?! hahaha this is my HELL
Good old reliable Atari STs!
I used to think “Wow.Read newspapers on a computer.Imagine”. Now I often think “who still reads newspapers?”. It all seems like yesterday.
Bizarrely, some people still read yesterday's news on sheets of paper.
@@russcattell955i It takes all sorts eh.
Now they get their fake news from social media.
I still prefer to read paper newspapers, because the adverts are a lot less irritating than on devices!
Electronically yours...
"Electronic Jack-of-all-trades" :D iPhone
so the email came before the internet hmm you learn something new everyday!
Email has always used the internet. It's the World Wide Web that came later.
The born of Google
how could a 86' person have understood this show
email will never catch on
And so,.. Skynet was born!? 🤓
Your mind is really gonna be blown when I tell you about Tinder
Micro Live had the GTA Vice City's logo font and colours
Vice City is set in the 80's when that sort of font and colour scheme was common, it's part of the retro style. Though seeing as GTA's creators have been known to pay homage to the shows they grew up with and they were originally a computer club in the early 80's I wouldn't be surprised if they were fans of Micro Live and based the Vice City logo on it.
OH yeah sure it's all fun and games until someone gets sucked into TRON
BT Gold 😂
You simply have to be on electronic mail these days
Learn from the past.
Trust me... Telephone is much more futuristic than any email ever. All email and sms did is cause more and more issues between people. Voice brings the actual closeness.
then: central computer
now: server
Didn't care what he looked like. Pfft, yeah right.
She seemed to be acting up. "Mac" Davis emailed her frequently!!
Why is this thought of as historical? I use the same modem system!!!
It's 2022 and I, for one, am glad that none of this witchery came to be.
MOE DEMS!?!!?
Demos failed even in 1986
Go d their r some random s about
In the comment s
Why not ge t a #life
Th I s is fascinating
Li ke
#bbc
@ 2:30. See The Guardian was still as inaccurate and out of touch back then as it is today!
0:13 lie detected
LOL
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.
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
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.
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.
And spam got invented just about 5 minutes later ...
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.
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 :)
What a lovely view from her office window.
What a nice comment.
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!
Are we to assume that Micheal was not the most handsome of chaps…
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.
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!
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.
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.
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: ua-cam.com/video/1iAJPoc23-M/v-deo.html
@@CountScarlioni "Oh my god we're living in the future!!!" yesss very good phrase
A perfect exposition of the difference between British and US computers…
They were talking about the new Era with excitement and were are watching back their Era with curiosity lol
It'll never catch on.
nope. just like netflix. just like mp3s.
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.
Electronic mail you say? This'll never take off!
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.
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 🙂
Fred was ready for cricket at any point.
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!
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.
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.
No error detection/correction on the modem line!
I'm on email. You simply have to be these days.
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,.
Minitel was better than this.