Does the idea that people would need a tutorial — even a video tutorial — to send an email seem outlandish? Nowadays, for us, sending an e-mail from a computer, smartphone or even a tablet is a matter of course and a matter of time. In 1984, which is where the video we're talking about in this article comes from, but a lot of people actually had no idea what the email actually was.
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The video comes from the British television channel Thames TV's Database program, and contains instructions on how to send an email using the Prestel system. The program was aimed at computer and technology enthusiasts in the 1980s. In this particular episode, Julian Green introduces a system called Prestel (short for "Press Telephone”). Sending an email message through this system was a much more complicated process than it is today.
Users first had to pick up the handset and dial the main system on the rotary dial. In the video, we can see how the Prestel page was loading, or that Julian apparently uses the password "1234" to log into the system. The system's pages look more like teletext than the Internet. Julian Green and his wife Pat explain that they share the computer seen in the video with several other users. The first personal computers were by no means cheap, and even owning a page in the Prestel database had to be paid for.
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