EXPLORING PRESTEL
CONNECTING WITH PRESTEL “Although some home computer users accessed Prestel on their BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum or similar, most people used a Prestel adapter.”
Thirty years ago the CERN European particle physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland released the first web browser. For the first time, the World Wide Web, which had been developed at CERN a couple of years earlier in 1989 by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, was available to other research institutions and the general public. It’s no overstatement to say that the world has never been the same since.
How that milestone has influenced industry, commerce, popular culture and so much more is well-known. What is less well-appreciated is the technology that this momentous achievement helped bring to a close. That earlier technology – the UK’s Prestel system and similar Viewdata services in other countries – is our subject in this month’s feature.
This isn’t just a history lesson, though. We’ll show you something of the underlying technology using some exercises that you can try out yourself and, if you’ve ever doubted it, you’ll discover how much of a game changer the web really was compared to its predecessor.
Prestel uncovered
If you’re not old enough to have delved into Prestel back in the 80s, or if you were around at the time but, like so many
