Telecom Gold was an early commercial electronic mail service launched by British Telecom in 1982. It was based on Prime

Prime Computer

Prime Computer, Inc. was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. The alternative spellings "PR1ME" and "PR1ME Computer" were used as brand names or logos by the company.-Founders:...

 minicomputer

Minicomputer

A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...

s running Dialcom

Dialcom

Dialcom Inc. was a US corporation which developed the world's first commercial electronic mail service. It was founded in 1970 by Robert F. Ryan and was sold to ITT Corporation in 1982, becoming ITT Dialcom....

 software (ITT Dialcom was later acquired by BT in 1986). The system offered various services, including e-mail to and from other Telecom Gold users and those of Dialcom services in other countries, and other e-mail systems such as Sprint

Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel Corporation is an American telecommunications company based in Overland Park, Kansas. The company owns and operates Sprint, the third largest wireless telecommunications network in the United States, with 53.4 million customers, behind Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility...

 and integration with telex

Telex

Telex may refer to:* Telex , , a communications network** Teleprinter, the device used on the above network* Telex , a Belgian pop group...

, fax

Fax

Fax , sometimes called telecopying, is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material , normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device...

, online databases and an experimental OCR

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

 system for a short while. Later, X.400

X.400

X.400 is a suite of ITU-T Recommendations that define standards for Data Communication Networks for Message Handling Systems — more commonly known as "email"....

 functionality was added.

Users would dial in to the system using a conventional modem

Modem

A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...

 and terminal emulator

Terminal emulator

A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture....

. Alternatively, users could dial a local number and connect via the PSS

Packet Switch Stream

In the United Kingdom, Packet Switch Stream was an X.25-based packet-switched network, provided by the British Post Office Telecommunications and then British Telecom starting in 1980...

 X.25

X.25

X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet switched wide area network communication. An X.25 WAN consists of packet-switching exchange nodes as the networking hardware, and leased lines, Plain old telephone service connections or ISDN connections as physical links...

 network. The X.400 services also had a Mail User Agent which ran on IBM PC

IBM PC

The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...

s and compatibles.

The service eventually became obsolete with the growth of the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

.

During the 1980s, BT Gold hosted one of the first online communities. Users communicated using a noticeboard (noticebd) and via a simple chat facility which allowed real-time conversations to take place. The BT Gold community was worldwide, but the majority of users were in London and used to meet regularly at "Eyeballs" (coined from CB

Citizens' band radio

Citizens' Band radio is, in many countries, a system of short-distance radio communications between individuals on a selection of 40 channels within the 27-MHz band. Citizens' Band is distinct from the FRS, GMRS, MURS and amateur radio...

usage).