15 Jun
2004
15 Jun
'04
4:27 a.m.
Rob O'Donnell wrote:
I think I could get hold of some dial-up terminals if anyone is interested.
Dan
I'd love to see the server-side of things running somewhere again
though.
It'd be nice to have a Prestel server at Bletchley with some assorted
80's machines hooked up to it (bodging the phone network inbetween :)
but chances are that nobody's got a copy of the necessary server
software any more :-(
This is something I would like to see, too.
I should still have enough equipment and software about to set up at
least two of the various BBC-micro based servers which I ran at various
times, including the multi-user software that the GnomeAtHome ran on
which I had an official copy of...
Maybe when I finally get the spare room sorted out, I'll have enough
space to stack a couple of machines up and run the BBS again, linked to
a terminal server, I think, not the raft of phone lines I used to
have... (Ah, the joys of building ring-detect circuits for cheap and
nasty 1200 baud modems that didn't have them..)
Even if they did have the server software, I
can't see them having a
snapshot of live data from the 80's which is what would make it really
interesting. I don't really fancy writing a few hundred fake pages :-)
I've heard mention of some sort of viewdata server system there (not
Prestel), although I haven't personally stumbled across it in storage
yet (no room currently to have it on display!). PDP hardware IIRC. I'll
have to find some more details and then see how viable it is to get
running again...
There was a viewdata server for internal use at Micronet's London office
when I worked there back in the '80s. It was definitely a PDP11 of some
flavour, (two waist-high white cabinets, three huge white disc packs.) I
don't know what software it actually ran, but we used standard prestel
terminals with it.. There was a normal console sat on top we used to
run the backups on (swap packs, copy up, swap packs, copy down..) Maybe
you got that, or something similar?
It would
seem that there is little point in finishing off the rough
edges on my X-Windows Prestel terminal software ;-)
See above :-)
cheers
Jules