[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[John Winters]

On 05/11/10 20:14, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
[snip]
> I was quite young when the tories were in power last so I don't remember 
> their reign in any detail but I'd guess the most complex working IT 
> system they would have presided over (although developed under a labour 
> GPO) would have been Prestel which, at its peak, only consisted of 12 
> networked machines for the whole UK.

"Networked" is stretching it a bit - they were linked together by 9.6k
and 64k X.25 connections.  However the fact that just 12 machines could
support the whole of the UK speaks volumes for how efficiently the
software was written.  The whole of Australia was serviced by just two
live systems (one running and one hot spare) situated in Melbourne.

We used to benchmark systems with 750 simultaneous users logged on and
actively retrieving pages on a single GEC 4190 which was specially
upgraded for the occasion to - wait for it - 8M of RAM.

In a sense, Prestel was an attempt to implement the web just a bit too
early, when the technology didn't exist to support it.  It was fun though.

John
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