Prestel was the brand name for the United KingdomPost Office's Viewdata technology, It was an interactive videotex system developed during the late 1970s and commercially launched in 1979. It achieved a maximum of 90,000 subscribers in the UK and was eventually sold by BT in 1994.
The technology was a forerunner of on-line services today. Instead of a computer, a television set hooked to a dedicated terminal was used to receive information from a remote database via a telephone line. The service offered thousands of pages ranging from consumer information to financial data but with limited graphics.
