then telecoms minister John Butcher a £25 subsidy for Micronet subscribers to have their homes equipped free with a telephone jack-socket for the relevant modem. The Telemap editorial staff was first based at 8 Herbal Hill, Clerkenwell, London (after the preliminary discussions and presentation at EMAP's offices in Hatton Garden), and the technical staff in an EMAP building in Peterborough. In 1986 the technical staff moved down to the London building. Telemap was to be the base for Micronet 800 and the editorial development of the site. Hease's and Denton's "Prism Micro Products", the exclusive distributor of Sinclair Computers in the UK, was charged with developing the required modems for the enterprise, to ensure that Micronet 800's pages could be accessed by such microcomputers as Apple II, ZX81, BBC Micro, Dragon 32/64, IBM PCs, PET, and subsequently the ZX Spectrum, Sinclair QL, Camputers Lynx, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and other 1980s home computers. Although fast by contemporary standards, Prestel modems were quite slow from today's point of view (1200 baud download, 75 upload) and the display was just 24 lines of 40 characters, with seven colours and very simple block graphics. Yet Micronet 800 had versions of many of the Internet's subsequent features, especially an interactive 'ChatLine' (similar to Internet Relay Chat) developed by Mike Brown, who joined Micronet 800 from the Council for Educational Technology, where he'd devised a standard UK format for downloadable programs which became known as 'telesoftware'. Micronet 800 was quite similar in scope to, and compatible with, the German Bildschirmtext and French Minitel services, but Minitel achieved volume sales for its terminals by the simple expedient of replacing paper telephone books with their terminals. Based on its success, Minitel proved resilient against the Internet adoption in France. For Micronet, Denton negotiated that the interested parties would all agree to adopt the CET, Council for Educational Technology, format for telesoftware - one of two then competing formats. Telesoftware allowed users to download software directly from the Prestel site. Micronet then negotiated with hobbyist computer groups to provide applications and utilities that would be listed on, and be downloadable from, the Micronet 800 site. Approximately 50% of software - for Sinclair, Apple, BBC Micro, IBM, etc. - was available at no cost, and the other 50% was paid for by the automatic addition of the cost of the software to the subscriber's telephone bill. Prism developed a broad