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Huz · 06-25-2006, 06:58 AM

My dad bought a baud 1200 modem for his Sinclair QL sometime before 1991 and we connected to local BBS things - I'm not even sure if they had 'internet' access, but if they did it would have been for sporadic email exchange only. It was all about local message boards and local mail, and you certainly couldn't download anything worthwhile at 1200bps.

I remember you could do 'online banking' with it though - some banks had their own text-based, advanced ATM-style systems you could dial into. And so did Argos. To misquote Michael Caine, not a lot of people know that...

While clever, it was all a bit pointless really, so when the modem broke we didn't get back online until BBC science show "Tomorrow's World" started pimping their web site in 1995 or so. We checked it out from the local college and it was all text. Pft!

We got the internet at home soon after getting our first PC, in 1997, and not knowing any better we went for AOL... from being hardcore BBS users to being on AOL was a bit of a comedown really.

06-25-2006, 06:58 AM	#6
Huz Kersal Massive Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Manchester Posts: 1,430	My dad bought a baud 1200 modem for his Sinclair QL sometime before 1991 and we connected to local BBS things - I'm not even sure if they had 'internet' access, but if they did it would have been for sporadic email exchange only. It was all about local message boards and local mail, and you certainly couldn't download anything worthwhile at 1200bps. I remember you could do 'online banking' with it though - some banks had their own text-based, advanced ATM-style systems you could dial into. And so did Argos. To misquote Michael Caine, not a lot of people know that... While clever, it was all a bit pointless really, so when the modem broke we didn't get back online until BBC science show "Tomorrow's World" started pimping their web site in 1995 or so. We checked it out from the local college and it was all text. Pft! We got the internet at home soon after getting our first PC, in 1997, and not knowing any better we went for AOL... from being hardcore BBS users to being on AOL was a bit of a comedown really.