‘Early morning, semi-detached Highgate, London’ The received pronunication voice-over has BBC written all over it and in fact was recorded by the great Derek Cooper of the Food Programme fame. In the late sixties, the web as we know it wasn’t even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, but already the idea of networking was starting to take shape, as this clunky teleprinter was connected to a ‘giant brain’ ten miles away. I remember the teleprinter from the Grandstand football results in the 1970s but had no idea they were quite as noisy. No wonder his wife sent him and his teleprinter to the spare bedroom. Fascinating glimpse too of what must be the first on-line diary held by ‘the brain’.

It is hard to believe these days that in the early 1980s you needed to connect your computer to a telephone line, using an acoustic coupler, in order to send an email. The coupler converted your electronic mail into a series of audio pulses.  This vintage BBC clip captures the early days of electronic mail, via an Apple II computer, with some seriously impressive floppy discs in support.

Binary Joke Department: There are 10 sorts of people in the world.  Those who can read binary code and those who can’t.