Jay Springett shares an astonishing clip from a British show called Database which aired in the 1980s.
In the clip they demonstrate plugging in a modem, connecting to a network online, looking at a ‘magazine’ like home page with all the comings and goings on the network. Mrs Pat Green explains that she keeps records like ‘whats in the freezer, and names and addresses’ etc, extolls the virtues of word processing, sends an email to the show live on air, then they print it out on a Dot matrix printer, and finally the show distributes some free software to the nation.
If you don’t click through and watch all the way to the end, what you missed is the host explaining that once she’s done, the show will broadcast tones you can record to “download” software for various computer platforms.