Micronet 800

Possibly the biggest, and certainly the most successful of the Prestel IPs (Information Providers).  Micronet 800 was a partnership between East Midlands Allied Press and British Telecom.  Unfortunately they never hit their target of 100,000 subscribers.

Launched in 1983 targeting Tandy, Apple, Sinclair ZX81, Dragon and RML-380Z machines, their core market quickly became users of the Sinclair Spectrum, BBC Micro and Commodore 64 - Not surprising, as these were the most successful home computers of the 1980s.  A PC package was later available, too, but because of the limitations of the graphics on early PCs, was not very successful.

Micronet was instrumental in popularising online communications with the first generation of Home Computer users.  One of their more successful promotions was giving away free modems with a years subscription - made possible by their buying the stock of the collapsed Prism Microproducts at knock down price.

Among the revolutionary features introduced by Micronet were "Chatline", whereby messages from users were automatically and immediately republished so that everybody could see them and respond in kind, the "Gallery" where any user could rent their own page and publish what they wanted, and their brining MUD to the attention of the masses, through a partnership with "Shades".











We're still looking for backups and archived pages, so if you have any further examples, please get in touch!

Why not check out the Brochures to see how Micronet promoted themselves.



more to come!