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Micronet 800 was a provider of information and communication services hosted on Prestel, a British videotex service, from 1983 to 1991. It targeted the UK home computer market and operated as an online, subscription-based magazine and database. Subscribers also received Log On, a print quarterly.

Micronet 800 offered computer-related news, reviews of hardware, software, and videogames, access to turn-based and real-time multiplayer games (MUDs), downloadable telesoftware, chatrooms and bulletin boards, business and personal finance advice, and email, telex, and other forms of messaging. In addition, a group, club, or individual could rent space on the database.

A subscriber connected to Micronet 800 via the Prestel network using an ordinary phoneline (typically at local call rates) and a microcomputer equipped with a modem. If their microcomputer had not been set up to access Micronet’s home page automatically, they entered *800# to do so.

Drawing on this material, Reid-Maroney (2013) concludes that Hughes first saw his encounters with the Black community of Dresden through the lens of the Society's guiding narrative, one that had aroused his compassion and led him to come to Canada: the rescue of fugitive, passive slaves by whites.

However, in her view, after meeting independent, politically active Black families in Dresden who did not match this image, Hughes' original attitude changed: it was largely supplanted by a sense of kinship and partnership, particularly when it came to (as Reid-Maroney quotes from Hughes' diary), "the little band between whom and myself actually exists the relation of pastor and people." As pastor, notes Reid-Maroney, Hughes gave charitable assistance freely and provided spiritual counsel; the members of his church, though, were far from passive, providing a room for the school, a building-lot for the church, and presenting new clothes to Hughes and members of his family.

Reid-Maroney also points out that Hughes became attentive to how class differences intersected with lines drawn by colour. She remarks how he wrote, in a letter of 1861 to the Society, "We have several extremely well-conducted families here, not fugitives, whose habits and manners and general intelligence are far in advance of the majority of the whites in the neighbourhood". She goes on to illustrate, from the same letter, how Hughes viewed those who were against slavery yet prejudiced against Blacks:

What makes the matter more shocking is this, that all branches of the Christian Church give way to it! Ministers, both in the States and in Canada, being for the most part dependent on their congregations for support, are in no position to set themselves against the general feeling. While, therefore, numbers are to be found loud and eloquent enough in their advocacy of the abolition of slavery, and denouncing in the strongest terms the cruelty of the slave-owner; yet hardly a minister of the Gospel can be met with, who will take the free-colored man by the hand and treat him as a friend and brother.

According to Reid-Maroney, who points to a diary entry made a decade later (not long before the consecration of the mission church), Hughes had by then become deeply disappointed about what he perceived as a hardening of racial prejudice:

Felt very much depressed in spirit today. Sometimes think that my work is done in this mission. The change brought about by the great influence of the whites has made my work much more trying and difficult than formerly. The unchristian prejudice against color seems to be ineradicable.

She summarises his intellectual trajectory as follows: "Thomas Hughes had come to Dresden lamenting the ignorance of the 'poor fugitives'; by the 1870s it was the ignorance of white churchgoers he deplored."

Testing, testing

Analyses

In the aftermath of Prestel's pivot, in the early 1980s, from a focus on the general public to targeting the business community, the professions, and microcomputing enthusiasts, Noll (1985) studied the possible reasons for Prestel's lack of take-up by households. He concluded that the following factors might have been significant: a shortage, at the beginning of the commercial service, of affordable Prestel-adapted TV sets and, later, adaptors; high frame-access and time-based online charges; the large size of the database, and the difficulty of searching it; and the variation in how information providers (IPs) arranged and presented their Prestel pages.

Noll contrasted the "relative failure" of Prestel with the "success" of teletext, noting that receiving the latter was free and its database much smaller. Overall, he questioned "the [...] hypothesis that the information needs of consumers can be satisfied by a large, centralized, computerized database of general-interest information."

After consulting a group of experts in the videotex domain, Grover & Sabherwal's conclusions (1989) largely concurred with Noll's. In addition, they judged that government subsidy was required to boost public interest and take-up. This latter view was also held by Mosco, a political economist, writing in 1982: "[T]he British government appears to be prepared to let Prestel sink or swim on its own commercial ability ... It is too early to offer a complete assessment of Prestel. However, the direction of development is clear: the need for immediate commercial success means cutting back on earlier mass marketing efforts and an emphasis on specific business uses."

In a paper published shortly after Prestel had been discontinued in 1994, Case examined the motivations behind the development of Prestel and other videotex services from a sociological perspective. In his view, "[E]xplanations of videotex require consideration of higher-level phenomena [such] as policy, ideology, belief, and vision". He identified the vision of videotex as the facilitator of mass participation in an emerging information society – a belief held and promoted by many politicians, futurists, sociologists, and business leaders in the 1960s and 1970s – as a crucial spur to the development of the technology and the roll-out of services. This vision was animated, according to Harmeet & Sandvig's summary (2006) of scholarly views, by the "converging agendas of myriad players ... all seeking to increase revenues in otherwise saturated markets": phone companies (increased network traffic), set and terminal manufacturers (more sales), newspapers and news outlets (additional outlets for content), and business sectors such as banks and the travel trade (looking to reduce transaction costs).

Regarding Prestel, Case summarised the problems it faced (as identified by a former chief executive) as the lack of a trigger service, poor-quality information, complicated charges, competing services, and uncoordinated marketing by IPs, British Telecom, and terminal and adaptor providers. Insufficient market research into "what sorts of information people actually use, and what delivery modes are appropriate for them" was identified by Thomas & Miles (1989) as a further reason why Prestel failed to live up to expectations.

Poor (2006) suggested that the failure of Prestel to achieve significant mass-market take-up was linked to its "highly centralized and closed" nature. He cited the control over content exercised by IPs and the system operator (i.e, British Telecom), coupled with a lack of connectivity to both non-videotex online services and other videotex services based on different technical standards. On standards, Poor (2004) believed that "A universal videotex standard would have been like the common gauge for railroad, or common standards for the telegraph or the telephone. Disparate systems could connect, and enjoy network externalities due to scale."