I wasn't even aware that technology was available in 1984. It's amazing how much we take for granted today. These videos help in appreciating that just checking your account balance online is a privilege.
Check out The Mother of All Demos. It's a computer demonstration given by Douglas Engelbart in 1968. It included use of a mouse, windows, collaborative editing, video calling, and even hypertext (linking).
France had the internet for commercial use already in 1978. Thing is the interwebz, which was invented in the 1960's, was an expensive thing to have. Hardware was expensive and the phone bill was astronomical.
Now that I think about it, we actually did have our own prehistoric version of this. When I was 8 years old back in ‘84, my Dad subscribed briefly to an early civilian internet service provider called Compuserve. The most notable thing I remembered about it was that you could actually buy a new car through it, long before Carvana or even eBay Motors was ‘a thing.’ Problem was, there was only one dealership that participated in this. From what I recall, it was a Buick dealership based out of Houston, TX. Still, very impressive for the mid 1980s…
+dembot24 However, he was saying it was a ridiculously SMALL amount for 3 months worth of gas (used to pay quarterly, not monthly). With inflation at approx 300% since 1984, £13 for 3 months is actually the equivalent of paying £13 a month TODAY, hence the "ridiculous amount". The helpful example next to that input box was "eg £127.52". Also look at his previous FDC for £100 @1:10 (not to mention he's earning £118 a month in interest!)
That bank guy was pretty straight to the point lol 'either give me £1000 or owe me money'. Especially as £1000 is more like £3,200 in today's money! Thanks for uploading.
1984? Amazing. I only got a decent Internet connection in the mid 2000s and was still not paying Bill's online even at that point! Never realized it was first mooted in the early 80s
I'm the same age as Google, so all I've ever known is Google. I've now been watching videos on "vintage technology" for a while and all of this is quite fascinating.
I remember this man, Tony Bastable from "4 Computer Buffs". I think Thames Television just took "Database", repackaged it as "4 Computer Buffs", and sold it to Channel 4.
Evonne Okafor You were not able to do this in 1984. This was pie in the sky kind of stuff back then, thus the amazement of paying a bill via a computer. It would be 15 years or so before this kind of thing became ‘normal’...and even then it didn’t really become mainstream with all generations for about another decade or so beyond that.
In France there was a thing called Minitel back then (launched in 1982) and it was quite common to use it, as the devices were to lend from the France Telecom. You could not only do the stuff like the ones in the video, but also you could sex chat on it:)
Of course you could, we all used bulletin boards back in the eighties, this was before the internet as we know it now lol... Google Bulletin Board System, or BBS as it was also known.. :D This takes me back, have such fond memories of those years... lol..
@@RoadCone411 rubbish... you don't know what you're talking about! All he did was connect to a private BBS on the banks own server. Bulletin Board Systems were huge in the eighties.. I was seventeen at the time this was made and had be working with computers since I was 15. I spent large amounts of my spare time on the network of BBS, you could download software, send mail, and a whole host of other things, all dependant on who's BBS site you were on.. You could also access other sites through a gateway. You really don't know what you're talking about lol..
It was probably 2014 when I started ordering grocery delivery thru the Amazon app, 30 years after this broadcast. I literally refuse to set foot inside a grocery store now, the closest I get is picking up my online order ~outside~ the store in my car
Imagine if post offices became pubs like say the last post in Southend and we all drunk fosters at 9am instead of posting letters. Imagine the chaos in every town!😉
They synced the cameras and monitors both run at 50hz, they used to also sync all the cameras in a studio to the same sync. In film they used a device called a sync box which did a similar thing.
Looks like Teletext, probably used the same system, mind blowing to think the tech was around when I was a kid, but didn't catch on till at least 10 years later.
This was the same year I was born, to be fair the technology was there and could have been used and developed.... but the biggest reason is cost.... At the time the technology was far too expensive for consumers and businesses especially small. Same with Virtual Reality at the time in the late 80's, it wasn't financially viable as the technology was too expensive... it's only now the technology is getting more in consumers hands because the technology has got smaller and less costly.
Im just watching and studying all these videos. I bet so many of these advancements seemed ridiculous at the time. Now they form billion dollar industries.
Here are a few things you don't know: The internet, originally called the arpanet, was launched in 1969. The first e-mail was sent in 1971. In Britain BBC launched teletext (anyone remember that) in 1974. France had their own commerical internet (minitel) launched for everyone to use in 1978. And the protocol we all know as the worldwide web (www) launched in 1989 as the main protocol for the commericialization of the internet which launched in 1994 after being tested out since 1991.
Innovators and other firsts rarely, if ever, are successful. Apple wasn't first with the smartphone. Facebook wasn't the first social media platform. RUclips wasn't the first video streaming service. And Netflix wasn't the first home content delivery service. The point is that being ahead of its time doesn't equal success. Stuff like the above go through countless changes and iterations before achieving success. Look at how you pay your bills today online compared to bespoke and proprietary systems like NBS' "Homelink". Such a vast infrastructure to build a small and limited service. What really happened was something far more elegant, efficient and actually simpler. And more importantly cheaper. Banks and Building Societies after all don't build out the entire system between you and them. They don't provide the physical infrastructure, the equipment, the software or the data centres required to provide this online platform.
32 years later and grocery delivery is still not available in smaller cities (there's Prime Pantry, but no way to get anything you want delivered from your local stores).
"so what else can it do" he says "well in the future, someone sitting on the beach in the Bahamas will probably be able to empty your bank account, that's what it can do" ... understand?
Shit why am I using PayPal like an idiot. Time to open a Nottingham Building Society account.
I wasn't even aware that technology was available in 1984. It's amazing how much we take for granted today. These videos help in appreciating that just checking your account balance online is a privilege.
Check out The Mother of All Demos. It's a computer demonstration given by Douglas Engelbart in 1968. It included use of a mouse, windows, collaborative editing, video calling, and even hypertext (linking).
It's mind blowing. 🤯
France had the internet for commercial use already in 1978.
Thing is the interwebz, which was invented in the 1960's, was an expensive thing to have.
Hardware was expensive and the phone bill was astronomical.
*we had only just eradicated the dinosaurs ...*
Now that I think about it, we actually did have our own prehistoric version of this. When I was 8 years old back in ‘84, my Dad subscribed briefly to an early civilian internet service provider called Compuserve. The most notable thing I remembered about it was that you could actually buy a new car through it, long before Carvana or even eBay Motors was ‘a thing.’ Problem was, there was only one dealership that participated in this. From what I recall, it was a Buick dealership based out of Houston, TX. Still, very impressive for the mid 1980s…
These clips are a treasure...thanks for uploading
It's amazing how sci-fi this all seemed then. Now I'm sat on the toilet watching this. Blows my mind.
im literally taking a dump watching this
So what!!
I'm 48. Watching in the Bath 🛁 on my tablet. Yeah it is something. The inter web of world 🌎 s wde wonders changed the world as we knew it.
I wipe with my phone
On the toilet right now, with my tablet...
Tony Bastable (15 October 1944 - 29 May 2007). R.I.P.
"And as I have a sense of humour today" is the best line ever to start using a computer in the 80s
It's sad that we are not even valuing what we have.
Really great videos. Thanks a ton. 🙏
I'll pay my gas bill, lets put a ridiculous amount in....£13! i'm lucky if its less than 80 a month >< Go inflation!
+dembot24 However, he was saying it was a ridiculously SMALL amount for 3 months worth of gas (used to pay quarterly, not monthly). With inflation at approx 300% since 1984, £13 for 3 months is actually the equivalent of paying £13 a month TODAY, hence the "ridiculous amount". The helpful example next to that input box was "eg £127.52". Also look at his previous FDC for £100 @1:10 (not to mention he's earning £118 a month in interest!)
+Andy Merrett - Only rich people could afford this bleeding edge type of technology ;-)
Which at today's value is about £40k!
Electricity bills might be getting considerably more expensive soon if suppliers switch from reading true to apparent power.
I was born this year so I never got the chance to see equipment like that but, it’s great to see it on RUclips.
same! its so ridiculous that now we can use it from our phone
Nanci Sousa Gary Kildall would have been proud and excited at what we can do today.
That bank guy was pretty straight to the point lol 'either give me £1000 or owe me money'. Especially as £1000 is more like £3,200 in today's money! Thanks for uploading.
Do you think Mr. & Mrs. Smith have paid off their mortgage by now? 🙄☺😀
Maybe they defaulted during the early 90s recession.
@@lmtliam or if that one didn't get them the 2008 global economic crash would have lol
@@dolliciouscustoms9844 and if that one didn't this one will.
@@samnicholson5051And if that one didn't either, then the one in '32 probably will.
I should jolly well hope so 🤣
Fantastic - hard to find clips of Database! Fun fact, Rick Wakeman did the theme tune for this show!
"It's like a shopping centre in your own home, really..."
1984? Amazing. I only got a decent Internet connection in the mid 2000s and was still not paying Bill's online even at that point! Never realized it was first mooted in the early 80s
I started paying online somewhere in 2015, before i never used a card or online banking for payments.
that's a cool 'wireless' keyboard
I hope we get this technology soon.
1980's: Computers are great they will soon be a convenient way to buy your groceries online
2019:The death of High street and mass unemployment
Iceland due any minute!😉
oof. stay safe. higher unemployment in a few months
2020: thanks to the internet we have the rise of the idiot, males and females disappear and only eating vegetables becomes racist
Holy shit I'm actually paying my gas bill right now.
And when you've finished that rather depressing task do you unwind by checking whether your payment has been received?
Holy shit 😉 I'm not.
And in 2019 the Nottingham Building s
Society have no internet banking and still use bank books.
Someone needs to turn this idea of ordering things on a computer into a business and name it after a river in South America!
Like I said above: little could we ever have imagined…
I reckon we might be able to sell books and that sort of thing, I suppose we could call the company "Nile", has a nice ring to it.
Do you reckon we could buy holiday packages
"on the network".
with this new flanged computerised system?
That might be a winner ...
It's amazing how technology has rapidly evolved down years to what it is now. Fascinating stuff
Groceries? Gas bill? Computer hardware?
To hell with all that! Where's the porn?!
There was a big fear at the time that the Soviets would hack into these computers...and pay gas bills at random, to undermine bourgeois democracy.
I told you not to mess with those people, Janice.
😂😂🤣
Tony! Your the best! An excellent presenter.
Giving a computer away for using your service is incredible. I can't believe he was able to do that, given how expensive computers were back then.
Which is why you had to either pay 1000 pounds or have a mortgage.
that high-pitches background screeching though
That 25,000 pound mortgage lol
Thames must have full episodes of this...History of technology.
That keyboard still better than the new MacBook keyboard
😂
I'm the same age as Google, so all I've ever known is Google. I've now been watching videos on "vintage technology" for a while and all of this is quite fascinating.
I remember this man, Tony Bastable from "4 Computer Buffs". I think Thames Television just took "Database", repackaged it as "4 Computer Buffs", and sold it to Channel 4.
Never knew that you was able to do this sort of stuff in 1984!!!! Mind you I was 9 at the time.....
Evonne Okafor You were not able to do this in 1984. This was pie in the sky kind of stuff back then, thus the amazement of paying a bill via a computer. It would be 15 years or so before this kind of thing became ‘normal’...and even then it didn’t really become mainstream with all generations for about another decade or so beyond that.
I was nine too. :)
In France there was a thing called Minitel back then (launched in 1982) and it was quite common to use it, as the devices were to lend from the France Telecom. You could not only do the stuff like the ones in the video, but also you could sex chat on it:)
Of course you could, we all used bulletin boards back in the eighties, this was before the internet as we know it now lol... Google Bulletin Board System, or BBS as it was also known.. :D This takes me back, have such fond memories of those years... lol..
@@RoadCone411 rubbish... you don't know what you're talking about! All he did was connect to a private BBS on the banks own server. Bulletin Board Systems were huge in the eighties.. I was seventeen at the time this was made and had be working with computers since I was 15. I spent large amounts of my spare time on the network of BBS, you could download software, send mail, and a whole host of other things, all dependant on who's BBS site you were on.. You could also access other sites through a gateway.
You really don't know what you're talking about lol..
The very epitome of the 1980s - Computers and EPCOT Center
Okelyy dokely! You lost me at centre!😉
From such simple beginnings, look what its led to
This is 35 years ago. Unbelievable it’s on a hand held device I stare at for 12 hours a day as I get ready for another frozen dinner Christmas
That looks like that might be his genuine current account 😂
1:25 - Its Ebay!
Not really Ebay since it came out 11 years after this tv show but something that looks a bit like it yes.
@@kakaoen4 That's the point of his comment....
@@kakaoen4 🤦♂️
It was probably 2014 when I started ordering grocery delivery thru the Amazon app, 30 years after this broadcast. I literally refuse to set foot inside a grocery store now, the closest I get is picking up my online order ~outside~ the store in my car
Wow going inside a grocery store is so repulsive for you? What’s wrong with people
@@SilverWolf89936
The great unwashed...
Why can't computers look like that nowadays?
Internet shopping? That will never catch on
Thank God it never caught on. Imagine the devastation to the High Street if people didn't use the shops, banks, and Post Offices
Imagine if post offices became pubs like say the last post in Southend and we all drunk fosters at 9am instead of posting letters. Imagine the chaos in every town!😉
How did they film CRT without the crawling scan line artifacts?
They synced the cameras and monitors both run at 50hz, they used to also sync all the cameras in a studio to the same sync. In film they used a device called a sync box which did a similar thing.
Because the earth is flat, and the moon is a twirling torch in the sky. Yes it's 2019 and millions believe what I wrote lol
Eerm. Absolutely! 😉 what?😬
@@James-oo1yq
The Moon is made of cheese....
Thanks to the latest technology, the energy suppliers are now able to screw you over at an unprecedented speed.
1980s computers like the BBC Micro are so great. There was no debit card in 1984.
Is that true?
Gosh what I would do to owe that on my mortgage! Pay it off tomorrow.....
Looks like Teletext, probably used the same system, mind blowing to think the tech was around when I was a kid, but didn't catch on till at least 10 years later.
Love it. Thanks for posting Thames. 👍
Yep, teletext was our internet of the 80's and it was bloody free.
But your porn wasn't though lol
I'd get home drunk and read it for ages.
damn these video tapes look great for their time
An order over the airways replacing a trip to the shops, ha! that will never happen...wait, what???
Imagine not having to go to the bookies and placing your best at home?😬 now that would be something!😉
Bets
I still haven't paid my phone bill since 1984
Way ahead of its time
Here I am, using a bluetooth keyboard with a Pi4 on wifi hooked up to hdmi on my TV.
Yes even when I was 20 year. Old in the 1980 s
These computers and the internet was around
great sell from matey
well give a thousand pounds.
Computer nostalgia everywhere...
This will never catch on.
It’s like a shopping centre at home...yeah go grab that pixel pair of jeans for me in BLUE
Video looks a lot better than modern simulations would have you believe (well, British PAL system anyway)
I wish I had access to all the Prestel pages :(
He just paid his gas bill in 1984 and in 2020 I just paid my car insurance bill....:-D computers/smart phones, etc are great aren't they? :-D
They did not think about the mayhem of hackers and cybercrime.
Why didn't this take off?
The luddites
It was too expensive for its time you could buy a house with that money
Pretty awesome for 1984!
This technology has been around since at least 1980. There are BBC films on RUclips to confirm it.
The internet has nothing to do with it. Lets not change history. I lived this.
... who'd have thunk it ... internet shopping :)
"As I have a sense of humor today"....So British my teeth fell out!
This was the same year I was born, to be fair the technology was there and could have been used and developed.... but the biggest reason is cost.... At the time the technology was far too expensive for consumers and businesses especially small.
Same with Virtual Reality at the time in the late 80's, it wasn't financially viable as the technology was too expensive... it's only now the technology is getting more in consumers hands because the technology has got smaller and less costly.
Damn I can’t afford a thousand pounds for a gaming computer how times have changed
13 pounds is a silly amount. Boy. It's 2017 and my last electric bill was $38 (I live in a small apartment) and I still complain that's too high
I can do all that on my phone, and what a coincidence my phone cost me $1000.00.
Brilliant 🌞
Nice Balance They Had In They Account, 12 Million Pounds !
Instead of this being educational it's now become comical 🤣 £1000 for a computer that just shows text.😱
Im just watching and studying all these videos. I bet so many of these advancements seemed ridiculous at the time. Now they form billion dollar industries.
Like today ChatGPT is ridiculous for many people, right?
Has anyone made the ' this will never catch on ' joke yet ? .
There's always a few dozen to make this original comment..
Space. Question Mark. Space. Period.
5/7/84 looks like the UK was the first to do this
damn that suit!
Here are a few things you don't know:
The internet, originally called the arpanet, was launched in 1969.
The first e-mail was sent in 1971.
In Britain BBC launched teletext (anyone remember that) in 1974.
France had their own commerical internet (minitel) launched for everyone to use in 1978.
And the protocol we all know as the worldwide web (www) launched in 1989 as the main protocol for the commericialization of the internet which launched in 1994 after being tested out since 1991.
You have to pay me £1000 ? Back in 1984 that and still is a lot of money. 💸
Do i have to pay ads, intens in some video, with my data?
They have to pay, not me.
Amazing.
Innovators and other firsts rarely, if ever, are successful.
Apple wasn't first with the smartphone.
Facebook wasn't the first social media platform.
RUclips wasn't the first video streaming service.
And Netflix wasn't the first home content delivery service.
The point is that being ahead of its time doesn't equal success. Stuff like the above go through countless changes and iterations before achieving success. Look at how you pay your bills today online compared to bespoke and proprietary systems like NBS' "Homelink". Such a vast infrastructure to build a small and limited service. What really happened was something far more elegant, efficient and actually simpler. And more importantly cheaper. Banks and Building Societies after all don't build out the entire system between you and them. They don't provide the physical infrastructure, the equipment, the software or the data centres required to provide this online platform.
Those poor people still have a massive 25 thousand pounds left to pay on their mortgage
32 years later and grocery delivery is still not available in smaller cities (there's Prime Pantry, but no way to get anything you want delivered from your local stores).
Not enough demand. Also, it is avaiable in even rural areas in europe, Tesco does it. I'm sure there must be a similiar thing in the US.
you mean 32 years perhaps?
Oh yeah. lol Fixed it.
"so what else can it do" he says "well in the future, someone sitting on the beach in the Bahamas will probably be able to empty your bank account, that's what it can do" ... understand?
It'll never catch on. Anyway, must get back to my etchasketch
Tristan! My abacus please!😉
I'm using a stone tablet...
Can’t see this catching on
It will never catch on
His bank account balance was over £12000!
hutchcraftcp A fortune back in 84!!
I'm with the Woolwich.
I'm a northern rock 🎸man myself.
This will never catch on surely?
those rubber chicklet keyboards look horrendous
--- can anyone find the follow-up to this? is this show still on and did they find the mortgage lender later and see how it's been doing? --- 25MAY21
It'll never catch on
Nope
Thus is a great idea
wow 12 grand in a current account. back in 84 you could go get a mortgage with a deposit like that ;)
53k today...
It's like CEEFAX has been to uni!
Bank of England inflation calculator has inflation from 1984 - 2021 at 2.6% per year on average, with £12,000 in 1984 worth £31,349.23 in 2021.