12-08-2018, 06:37 AM
Oooh! I remember those days.
The first serious business I was a director of produced Ceefax-compatible systems for a lot of the big UK travel agents - all DEC OpenVMS backends running through a Ceefax/Oracle display driver and racks of modems.
Most of the high street travel agents had Teletext terminals capable of Ceefax/Oracle - BT developed an interactive system called Viewdata and launced a product using 1200/75 baud acoustic coupler modems called Prestel which airlines used to supply availability, so we piggy-backed on that and used the existing kit.
At one point we were in every high street travel agent in the country.
As an aside - we had the database of all the login usernames in use in all travel agents in the UK - whilst bored one evening, I plotted a frequency histogram of first names, and would you believe it, the median was shared by "Sharon" and "Tracy" (I included alternative spellings, e.g. "Tracey") - these two were something like 16% of all first names.
The first serious business I was a director of produced Ceefax-compatible systems for a lot of the big UK travel agents - all DEC OpenVMS backends running through a Ceefax/Oracle display driver and racks of modems.
Most of the high street travel agents had Teletext terminals capable of Ceefax/Oracle - BT developed an interactive system called Viewdata and launced a product using 1200/75 baud acoustic coupler modems called Prestel which airlines used to supply availability, so we piggy-backed on that and used the existing kit.
At one point we were in every high street travel agent in the country.
As an aside - we had the database of all the login usernames in use in all travel agents in the UK - whilst bored one evening, I plotted a frequency histogram of first names, and would you believe it, the median was shared by "Sharon" and "Tracy" (I included alternative spellings, e.g. "Tracey") - these two were something like 16% of all first names.
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