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Telecom Gold (sometimes also known as BT Gold) was an early commercial electronic mail service launched by British Telecom in 1982.[1] It was based on Prime minicomputers running Dialcom software under a customised version of PRIMOS. (ITT Dialcom was later acquired by BT in 1986.) The system offered various services, including e-mail to and from other Telecom Gold users and those of Dialcom services in other countries, and other e-mail systems such as Sprint and integration with telex, fax, online databases and an experimental OCR system for a short while. Later, X.400 functionality was added.

Users would dial into the system using a conventional modem and terminal emulator. Alternatively, users could dial a local number and connect via the PSS X.25 network. The X.400 services also had a Mail User Agent which ran on IBM PCs and compatibles.

The UK data centre was originally located in the basement of Beckett House 60-68 St Thomas St, Bermondsey, London, SE1 3QU but later moved to a custom built facility at Oxgate Centre, Oxgate Ln, London NW2 7JA which now houses LDEX1.

The service eventually became obsolete with the growth of the Internet in 1996:[2]

Although BT continued to market the service, it decided not to develop its [Telecom Gold] successor, Mailbox, into an Internet Service Provider when it became clear that people wanted to connect to the Internet during the early to mid 1990s. Instead, BT decided to launch a new Internet Service Provider, called BTnet, in 1994, and within two years, Mailbox had ceased to exist.

— Rutter (2005) p.195

During the 1980s, BT Gold hosted one of the first online communities. Users communicated using a noticeboard (noticebd) and via a simple chat facility which allowed real-time conversations to take place. The BT Gold community was worldwide, but the majority of users were in London and would meet regularly at “eyeballs” (coined from CB usage).[3]

See also

References

  1. ^ “BT Connected Earth history of e-mail”. Connected Earth. Archived from the original on 11 November 2016.
  2. ^ Rutter, Dorian (2005). “From Diversity to Convergence: British Computer Networks and the Internet, 1970-1995” (PDF). University of Warwick open access research repository – WRAP. University of Warwick. p. 195. Retrieved 10 August 2022. 5.6.2 The Demise of Proprietary Public E-mail Networks
  3. ^ Sinha, Indra (1999). The Cybergypsies love, life and travels on the electronic frontier. New York: Scribner. ISBN 978-0-684-81929-7.