Telecom Gold
Telecom Gold (sometimes also known as BT Gold) was an early commercial
Users would dial into the system using a conventional
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.
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
See also
- Steve Gold, alleged hackers of Prince Philip's Telecom Gold mailbox in 1985
References
- ^ "BT Connected Earth history of e-mail". Connected Earth. Archived from the original on 11 November 2016.
- ^ Rutter, Dorian. "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
- ISBN 978-0-684-81929-7.
