A cyberspace prank is played on Prince Philip before the internet even exists

‘Ah yes, this is an idea whose time has come,’ we purr, as we gaze down at the self-propelling hummus dish. ‘If only every innovation arrived at precisely the hour it were required.’

It’s indeed a sad fact that history is littered with ideas that are simply too far ahead of their time to succeed. In the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci was drawing plans for helicopters, a form of transport that would only become reality in the 20th century. René Descartes’ 1636 dream of a contact lens only became reality in 1888. And then there is Prestel.

Almost forgotten now, Prestel was Britain’s very own internet before the internet itself came on the scene. Launched by the Post Office in 1979, it was an information network that anyone could access from their home or business if they had a phone, a modem, a computer and a television (to use as a monitor). Invented by research engineer Sam Fedida, it was initially called Viewdata, marketed under the brand name Prestel, and used the phone network to link databanks brimming with useful information – a cool 100,000 pages at its launch, covering news, sport, transport timetables and a whole range of other areas.

Unfortunately, very few Britons were impressed by this. As 1981 dawned, Prestel had a mere 6,000 customers. Undaunted, the Post Office expanded the system. Unlike Teletext, Prestel was interactive – it began to offer online banking services for Bank of Scotland and Nottingham Building Society customers, theatre-ticket booking, and online shopping. A service called Micronet 800 allowed Prestel users to participate in chat rooms and online games. Another Micronet innovation called Mailbox gave users the chance to send messages to one another.

It was this last service that grabbed the attention of two British journalists – Robert Schifreen and Steve Gold. One day in October 1984, Schifreen was testing a modem when he found that some random numbers he had typed had gained him entry onto a page used by Prestel’s administrators (by that time British Telecom had taken over from the Post Office). This later gave him access to login information that allowed him to hack into the system.

Disturbed by the slipshod nature of Prestel’s security, which had been called into question repeatedly by other users and computer experts, Schifreen decided to have a look into Prince Philip’s Mailbox account. He would then publicise what he had done, and in this way compel British Telecom to do something about its approach to security.

In an interview with John Leyden for the online tech magazine The Register, Schifreen said that after he had had a browse around the royal inbox, ‘I phoned Steve [Gold] (who’d been pursuing Prestel in other ways). I then went and told Micronet what I’d done, and they told Prestel… who called in the Met [Metropolitan Police].’

Schifreen is leaving out a couple of the rungs in the ladder there. As Prestel was being told of the breach, Gold and Schifreen broke the story in the press, which meant that it got picked up by the national television news networks. Margaret Thatcher, who was in the process of ensuring that as much of Britain’s infrastructure was owned by as few Britons as possible, was beside herself with fury at the story, fearing that it might damage British Telecom’s forthcoming sell-off.

The prime minister, never one burdened with the need to fool people into thinking she didn’t know the price of everything and the value of nothing, pressurised Prestel into reporting the whistle-blowing pair to the police.

Both Schifreen and Gold were arrested. Farcically, since no legislation existed that specifically covered computer crime, they had to be charged under Section 1 of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981. The ‘forgery’ supposedly involved was somewhat tenuous. The prosecution applied it to the use of a password to enter the system and the damage caused afterwards (to prove he had gained access, Schifreen made a very minor change on the master page).

The two men pleaded ‘not guilty’ at the Crown Court on the grounds that they had not broken any law. When they were found guilty, they took their case to the Court of Appeal and won. The Crown responded by appealing to the House of Lords, which likewise found in favour of the defendants, on the grounds that the ‘forgery’ had only existed for a minute fraction of a second.

Although there had been previous computer-related cases that had been tried by contorting existing legislation, the Schifreen and Gold case exposed the glaring inadequacy of the law when it came to computer crime. The result was the Computer Misuse Act of 1990. Although it, too, was far from perfect, it was used by other countries as a template for their own laws that attempted to deal with computer-related offences. The British version has been updated several times since in a bid to keep up both with computer technology and evolutions in the development of the internet.

Ultimately, Prestel proved too expensive for its users, who were unwilling to fork out the £20 per annum subscription on top of usage charges and any equipment they might need to buy to get themselves online. The service kept going until 1994, when it was sold off and petered out, cruelly brushed aside by the emerging internet and its sparkly new World Wide Web. However, at least its administrators can claim the dubious honour of practising security procedures so lax that they sparked off a whole new field of British law.

As for Prince Philip’s mailbox, which had been at the centre of the maelstrom, the contents amounted to little more than messages from Prestel users sending good wishes to Princess Diana on her birthday. Those were more innocent times.