Internet shopping | Retro Computers | Database | 1984

[@nGAhGENVH0Ul]

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.

[@rb93077039]

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).

[@Isaac-gh5ku]

It's mind blowing. 🤯

[@fuqupal]

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.

[@sexobscura]

*we had only just eradicated the dinosaurs ...*

[@faschuck]

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…

[@lrodger2486]

These clips are a treasure...thanks for uploading

[@leejacksondev]

It's amazing how sci-fi this all seemed then. Now I'm sat on the toilet watching this. Blows my mind.

[@kripzyshow3798]

im literally taking a dump watching this

[@CARLIN4737]

So what!!

[@CARLIN4737]

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.

[@paradisebreeze1705]

I wipe with my phone

[@erebostd]

On the toilet right now, with my tablet...

[@s111stock]

Shit why am I using PayPal like an idiot. Time to open a Nottingham Building Society account.

Tony Bastable (15 October 1944 - 29 May 2007). R.I.P.

[@petecoventry6858]

"And as I have a sense of humour today" is the best line ever to start using a computer in the 80s

[@sachidanandaswain9742]

It's sad that we are not even valuing what we have. Really great videos. Thanks a ton. 🙏

[@Neelt2001]

Do you think Mr. & Mrs. Smith have paid off their mortgage by now? 🙄☺😀

[@lmtliam]

Maybe they defaulted during the early 90s recession.

[@dolliciouscustoms9844]

@@lmtliam or if that one didn't get them the 2008 global economic crash would have lol

[@samnicholson5051]

@@dolliciouscustoms9844 and if that one didn't this one will.

[@kennarajora6532]

@@samnicholson5051And if that one didn't either, then the one in '32 probably will.

[@sovietonion72]

I should jolly well hope so 🤣

[@chaziscool1092]

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.

[@rivolinho]

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

[@xsAMOR]

I started paying online somewhere in 2015, before i never used a card or online banking for payments.

[@Major_Lexx]

I hope we get this technology soon.

[@CaptchaNeon]

I was born this year so I never got the chance to see equipment like that but, it’s great to see it on KZbin.

[@nanci_sousa]

same! its so ridiculous that now we can use it from our phone

[@CaptchaNeon]

Nanci Sousa Gary Kildall would have been proud and excited at what we can do today.

[@sdaonline]

Fantastic - hard to find clips of Database! Fun fact, Rick Wakeman did the theme tune for this show!

[@cellux]

that's a cool 'wireless' keyboard

[@thedembot]

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!

[@kissmeraas]

+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!)

[@kissmeraas]

+Andy Merrett - Only rich people could afford this bleeding edge type of technology ;-)

[@johnmurray2595]

Which at today's value is about £40k!

[@Chalky.]

Electricity bills might be getting considerably more expensive soon if suppliers switch from reading true to apparent power.

[@Top10WizardReviews]

Holy shit I'm actually paying my gas bill right now.

[@DCI-Frank-Burnside]

And when you've finished that rather depressing task do you unwind by checking whether your payment has been received?

[@CARLIN4737]

Holy shit 😉 I'm not.

[@sjaakvankleef2929]

"It's like a shopping centre in your own home, really..."

[@lce124]

And in 2019 the Nottingham Building s Society have no internet banking and still use bank books.

[@dolliciouscustoms9844]

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

[@CARLIN4737]

Iceland due any minute!😉

[@jairolivares3015]

oof. stay safe. higher unemployment in a few months

[@robsawalker]

2020: thanks to the internet we have the rise of the idiot, males and females disappear and only eating vegetables becomes racist

[@elcaballoblanco9627]

Tony! Your the best! An excellent presenter.

[@Kelveron]

Someone needs to turn this idea of ordering things on a computer into a business and name it after a river in South America!

[@faschuck]

Like I said above: little could we ever have imagined…

[@XxLIVRAxX]

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.

[@stuartd9741]

Do you reckon we could buy holiday packages "on the network". with this new flanged computerised system? That might be a winner ...

[@cyrfung]

How did they film CRT without the crawling scan line artifacts?

[@mikiex]

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.

[@James-oo1yq]

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

[@CARLIN4737]

Eerm. Absolutely! 😉 what?😬

[@stuartd9741]

​@@James-oo1yq The Moon is made of cheese....

[@BrokeTheInterweb]

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.

[@tiadaid]

Which is why you had to either pay 1000 pounds or have a mortgage.

[@alembick]

1:25 - Its Ebay!

[@kakaoen4]

Not really Ebay since it came out 11 years after this tv show but something that looks a bit like it yes.

[@philipkempbell7174]

@@kakaoen4 That's the point of his comment....

[@SPcapx]

@@kakaoen4 🤦‍♂️

[@rem145]

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

[@wi4m]

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.

[@chrissilvester5663]

It's amazing how technology has rapidly evolved down years to what it is now. Fascinating stuff

[@danps7167]

Thames must have full episodes of this...History of technology.

[@oqeufh]

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.

[@acciunt]

that high-pitches background screeching though

[@evonne_]

Never knew that you was able to do this sort of stuff in 1984!!!! Mind you I was 9 at the time.....

[@RoadCone411]

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.

[@lafingas555]

I was nine too. :)

[@blinski1]

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:)

[@LindaTCornwall]

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..

[@LindaTCornwall]

@@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..

[@DCI-Frank-Burnside]

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.

[@jdm65]

I told you not to mess with those people, Janice.

[@MrOneanddone91]

😂😂🤣

[@citizenofcorona8783]

The very epitome of the 1980s - Computers and EPCOT Center

[@CARLIN4737]

Okelyy dokely! You lost me at centre!😉

[@rubeng96]

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

[@SilverWolf89936]

Wow going inside a grocery store is so repulsive for you? What’s wrong with people

[@stuartd9741]

​@@SilverWolf89936 The great unwashed...

[@ainsleystones4600]

Love it. Thanks for posting Thames. 👍

[@macmedic892]

Groceries? Gas bill? Computer hardware? To hell with all that! Where's the porn?!

[@pit_stop77]

From such simple beginnings, look what its led to

[@LNMarls]

That keyboard still better than the new MacBook keyboard

[@douglasgreen437]

😂

[@TylerDurden-ij1np]

Internet shopping? That will never catch on

[@MrAlwaysBlue]

Thank God it never caught on. Imagine the devastation to the High Street if people didn't use the shops, banks, and Post Offices

[@CARLIN4737]

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!😉

[@Wagoo]

I wish I had access to all the Prestel pages :(

[@tunggulsujarwob.archmba7751]

Do i have to pay ads, intens in some video, with my data? They have to pay, not me.

[@oledshwfgk3068]

That 25,000 pound mortgage lol

[@MrPantss]

Gosh what I would do to owe that on my mortgage! Pay it off tomorrow.....

[@derekthesec]

1980s computers like the BBC Micro are so great. There was no debit card in 1984.

[@SilverWolf89936]

Is that true?

[@JasmineSurrealVideos]

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.

[@ZeroNiteLite]

That looks like that might be his genuine current account 😂

[@akompsupport]

Why didn't this take off?

[@CARLIN4737]

The luddites

[@IDONTHAVEMUSTACHE]

It was too expensive for its time you could buy a house with that money

[@QuadTubeChannel]

Thanks to the latest technology, the energy suppliers are now able to screw you over at an unprecedented speed.

[@Kit_Bear]

Yep, teletext was our internet of the 80's and it was bloody free.

[@APRICEPRODUCTION]

But your porn wasn't though lol

[@liverush24]

I'd get home drunk and read it for ages.

[@Ballowax]

damn these video tapes look great for their time

[@andygcl6]

An order over the airways replacing a trip to the shops, ha! that will never happen...wait, what???

[@CARLIN4737]

Imagine not having to go to the bookies and placing your best at home?😬 now that would be something!😉

[@CARLIN4737]

Bets

[@randywatson8347]

Here I am, using a bluetooth keyboard with a Pi4 on wifi hooked up to hdmi on my TV.

[@customerservicemanager7184]

Why can't computers look like that nowadays?

[@HallofWisdom]

--- 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

[@liamwatson5125]

I love hearing the beep sound when you type. How do you enable that?

[@stevelawson911]

I still haven't paid my phone bill since 1984

[@DarrenJCalvert]

It’s like a shopping centre at home...yeah go grab that pixel pair of jeans for me in BLUE

[@CARLIN4737]

Way ahead of its time

[@staffoffice]

"As I have a sense of humor today"....So British my teeth fell out!

[@neilmansfield8329]

Yes even when I was 20 year. Old in the 1980 s These computers and the internet was around

[@randomglyn]

Video looks a lot better than modern simulations would have you believe (well, British PAL system anyway)

[@maximillianrexcarpediem1469]

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).

[@egykilenckilenchet]

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.

[@weilm]

you mean 32 years perhaps?

[@maximillianrexcarpediem1469]

Oh yeah. lol Fixed it.

[@cayleec5175]

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

[@mattprice7594]

This will never catch on.

[@richardfeynman5560]

Computer nostalgia everywhere...

[@ipKonfig]

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

[@fuqupal]

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.

[@robertrosario9335]

Does Anybody Else Sense Computer Waves At Any Alarming Rate In This Video ?

[@robertmarsh3588]

Pretty awesome for 1984!

[@CARLIN4737]

Brilliant 🌞

[@APRICEPRODUCTION]

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.

[@blissy1]

5/7/84 looks like the UK was the first to do this

[@liverush24]

This technology has been around since at least 1980. There are BBC films on KZbin to confirm it.

[@pqrstzxerty1296]

They did not think about the mayhem of hackers and cybercrime.

[@miagifodder5599]

great sell from matey well give a thousand pounds.

[@Kaiyats]

Damn I can’t afford a thousand pounds for a gaming computer how times have changed

[@carbonrough]

... who'd have thunk it ... internet shopping :)

[@andynixon2820]

Has anyone made the ' this will never catch on ' joke yet ? .

[@mpwheatley]

There's always a few dozen to make this original comment..

[@bigmike9947]

Space. Question Mark. Space. Period.

[@S.O.N.E]

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.

[@roprgm]

Like today ChatGPT is ridiculous for many people, right?

[@mlc4495]

Innovators and other firsts rarely, if ever, are successful. Apple wasn't first with the smartphone. Facebook wasn't the first social media platform. KZbin 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.

[@Tristinfate]

I can do all that on my phone, and what a coincidence my phone cost me $1000.00.

[@sovietonion72]

You have to pay me £1000 ? Back in 1984 that and still is a lot of money. 💸

[@richardprice7763]

This will never catch on surely?

[@sirronnitram8937]

It'll never catch on. Anyway, must get back to my etchasketch

[@CARLIN4737]

Tristan! My abacus please!😉

[@stuartd9741]

I'm using a stone tablet...

[@bibonagy]

damn that suit!

[@northhankspin]

Amazing.

[@sovietonion72]

Instead of this being educational it's now become comical 🤣 £1000 for a computer that just shows text.😱

[@eddie7319]

The internet has nothing to do with it. Lets not change history. I lived this.

[@krisraps]

Nice Balance They Had In They Account, 12 Million Pounds !

[@rewtaah]

It wasn't Internet, it was a single bbs site. Hello

[@OneSwitch]

It was. Interactive and international. Look up Prestel / Videotext.

[@mr.y.mysterious.video1]

Those poor people still have a massive 25 thousand pounds left to pay on their mortgage

[@uriituw]

“Internet shopping.” Where was the Internet in this video?

[@cayleec5175]

He had to get online to pay the bill...he did not go shopping though.

[@uriituw]

Caylee Cooper But ‘online’ doesn’t mean Internet.

[@cayleec5175]

@@uriituw how could you be online and paying your gas bill but not be on the internet?

[@uriituw]

Caylee Cooper ‘coz ‘online’ doesn’t necessarily mean Internet. Really. I don’t see what’s so hard about this.

[@James-oo1yq]

It'll never catch on

[@CARLIN4737]

Nope

[@safirahmed]

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.

[@markrogers7140]

Can’t see this catching on

[@josephjbyrne38]

It will never catch on

[@hutchcraftcp]

His bank account balance was over £12000!

[@_B.M_]

hutchcraftcp A fortune back in 84!!

[@blueshells50]

those rubber chicklet keyboards look horrendous

[@malcolmclements9254]

"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?