The Prestel system was implemented by Telecom Australia and renamed Viatel, with the centre of operations in Windsor, Melbourne, Australia.
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The innovations on which it was based were credited to Samuel Fedida at the then Post Office Research Station in Martlesham, Suffolk.
Prestel |
As a dedicated Prestel terminal with built-in word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, the Communicator found a niche market amongst travel agents in the United Kingdom and Italy, who used Prestel (and similar networks) as probably the earliest online booking service.
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The Communicator contained a full office software suite, including View software (word processor), ViewSheet (spreadsheet), and a fully featured Prestel terminal, plus (of course) Econet and many of the interfaces found on the BBC series of computers.
After experiments with Prestel, he found an early British online community, CIX in the late 1980s, before direct connections to the internet were cheaply available outside academia, and this provided him with a new social and business life.
In 2011 they created a book, ‘‘Delicious Jewels’’, in collaboration with the chef and author Tamasin Day-Lewis, published by Prestel.
This software (the first of its type for the Oric series of computers and was indeed one of the early pioneers of home computer communications) enabled the Oric 1 and Atmos to communicate with Prestel (a fore-runner of the Internet-which used Ceefax style graphics), with Bulletin Boards and facilitated the transfer of files from one Oric/Atmos to another, via the public telephone system.