The earliest on-screen URL

When I interviewed Bernard Newnham, the former producer of Points of View, heavens, ten years ago now, he said that Points of View was the first BBC programme to have an email address and his connection to the internet was the only one in TV Centre...
http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/oldott/www.offthetelly.co.uk/index8d21.html?page_id=482

As for the original post, I seriously doubt TVam had an email address or URL, I half wonder if they even owned a computer, to be honest. This thread is not just a thinly veiled excuse to try and find another lead for the TVS archive, is it?

Random also perhaps, but I was watching old episodes of 'The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder' and he asked for contributions on his 'electronic mail address' right from the start in 1995.

TV-AM outsourced their news to Sky after they lost their franchise in 1991. Does anybody know if TV-AM and Sky ever communicated with each other using email?

There could well have been an internal email system.

Breakfast Time had an electronic newsroom system from launch, it may be that TV-am introduced something similar.

My company had an internal DOS based email system in the early 90s, it replaced telex, and was slightly more cumbersome to use !

T


Here's an interesting article by Rory Cellan-Jones about the early days of newsroom computer systems:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21059806

The BBC used Basys after the initial system Breakfast Time had. Basys was in use until the mid-late 90s when ENPS took over. Anyone used to modern computers and smartphones would probably stare in amazement at Basys. Monochrome orange screens, clunky keyboards, text only. I'm not sure it included any form of user-user messaging but that function is an integral part of ENPS, and a bloody useful one too, even today.

Yes systems like Basys were around in the early 90s and they, like many corporate systems had internal messaging abilities.


I'm sure TVam would have had something similar, in fact I'm sure I've seen footage of their newsroom with computer terminals on desks. Sky would have had their own, but unlikely in those days they'd be linked especially as TVam had closed their news operation by that time


Unlikely, unless they'd established a data circuit between the two. Which for a year's use possibly not worth it


I'd have thought that anything they needed to communicate would have been done by phone and fax. Fax would be far quicker, easy and more efficient than emailing

Late reply but protocols are important when you consider that we have HTTPS now, but most webservers can redirect in a number of ways and "rewrite" URLs before serving a page. You can go HTTP and get redirected to the HTTPS for example.

ENPS"]BASYS had top line messaging - just like ENPS does. (The sound of a VT320-type terminal going 'ping' still rings in my ears!)

It also had more advanced 'email like' features for messages longer than would fit on a line. However, rather than emailing everyone with a message, it was more common to simply publish a page in a group 'read in' area that people checked when they logged in each day.

From memory some BASYS systems were very well organised and managed - and had far less 'digital debris' than more modern systems...

Some BASYS systems also allowed interconnection between sites, effectively allowing you to remotely log-in to a different server (though there were also ways of syncing / publishing areas automatically - so regional BASYS systems had copies of the One/Six/Nine O'Clock News running orders ISTR) It was also possible to remotely connect to other systems 'through' BASYS - including very early Linux boxes which offered things like the Lynx text-only web browser (yep - imagine the web with no graphics on a green/amber/white screen VDU terminal...)

.....and for anything else probably just a 4-Wire

Incidentally, BBC World Service's first email address was iac@bbc-iabr.demon.co.uk which dates back to 1994.

Yes, I'd forgotten the obvious. That would have been used for counting them in and out of bulletins and other on-air information