Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by walshemj on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @08:42AM (#16265160)

Ineresting I never new that BT's other online service Telecom Gold also used Pr1me's I think we where the largest non black user in the UK - I used to have root on all of them and super root on the billing systems.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by buserror on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @11:58AM (#16266844)

The primary reason we used them was the pretty cool 'ring' LAN that was X25 based -- since everything else was X25/X29 (Transpac) it was a natural choice. Remember back then available ethernet was still coax.

And speaking of root -- on the Pr1me was also 'root' as a system engineer, and I remember fondly the day I messed up the parenthesis in a macro, and ran a tool that proceeded to memset() and erase the whole of the shared memory on the machine. That was about 30 people who all called.... the system's engineer (me!) to ask what was going on! Needless to say, it was blamed on a cosmic ray.

When we switched to HP it took quite a while to get the same level of performance with HP's own X25 hardware/software. It's also the one and only time I ever played with X25 socket() API.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by hazeii on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @02:33PM (#16268225)

I thought they were GEC's but might well have been Primes.

I do recall being in Baynard House one night and having a furious shift leader burst in and shout that he wasn't putting up with Shades overloading various mainframes around the country ("what, my little box?" :) ).

Although I never saw much backroom stuff on Minitel, from the outside it was pretty sweet compared to working with BT.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by walshemj on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @04:40PM (#16269307)

Prestel was GEC's GEC 4082's Telecom Gold Was Pr1mes I think all 750's

I should have really had a trip out to baynard to check it out as I was I suppose the dev-op on the Dialcom side working on the new Billing system.

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