Farewell .....

As you will know by now, I was deeply involved with Prestel, Micronet 800 and other viewdata services back in the 1980s. I even worked for Micronet themselves between 1986 and 1988; that was by far the best job I ever had.

But a new wife, a new child, a new job and a new house took up most of my time, and money, and I'd pretty much dropped out of circulation by 1990.. As such, I completely missed the demise of Micronet until it was over, and never did catch up with most of the people I knew.

Twenty years later, with my life on another new course, and with some spare time, I'm trying to catch up! And I've been sent a pile of pages from the final days of Micronet. Reading all the farewells from the staff and members that I missed first time around has triggered so many fond memories. So many familiar names.

These will all be appearing up on viewdata.org.uk in due course. In the meantime, if any old 'netters want to say hi, please do so - either on this blog, or over at the forum.

Originally posted at blog.irrelevant.com.

Thanks, Comet. Not.

Some time back we splashed out on big plasma TV for the front room. It was seriously expensive, although free credit helped, so we thought it probably best to take the extended warranty.

Now over the last few months, it's had little red sparkles over the dark areas of the screen, so I called out the engineers and they agreed to repair it. It was duly carted away two weeks ago for repair, and Wednesday we got a call saying it was on it's way back, after having had it's actual display panel replaced!

It arrived yesterday. Two delivery men huffing and puffing as they carried it in. They opened up the shipping container, pulled off the bubble wrap and revealed the TV. With the screen totally smashed....

They were gutted. As were we. It's now on it's way back to Comet service ...

Where are they now?

Or... probably more accurately, "do they know who they were?"

As part of my work on viewdata.org.uk I've also come across, and been sent, quite a few pages saved from the various teletext services about at the time. I've started putting these up on teletext.org.uk which, as yet, is really more of a dumping ground than anything informative.

Anyway, when looking through these things, one finds things like this:

This dates from about 1986. Guessing that the kids who contributed would have been about the 10yo mark, that puts them at about 34 now, give or take. I wonder if Maria, Marie, Mariam or Sian knew that their words would still be remembered a quarter of a century later.