---
title: "The Email Of The Future In 1986"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-email-of-the-future-in-1986-vkyqgflwp
source_url: https://hackaday.com/2026/05/24/the-email-of-the-future-in-1986
type: article
source: "Hackaday"
published: 2026-05-25T02:26:15.873Z
updated: 2026-05-25T02:26:37.278Z
tags: ["retrocomputing"]
reading_time: 2
upvotes: 1
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# The Email Of The Future In 1986

**[Hackaday](https://daily.dev/sources/hackaday)** · 2 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A 1986 BBC Archive clip shows journalist Lesley Judd demonstrating email as a cutting-edge technology, using a bulky laptop, a payphone, and an acoustic coupler to send a message from the Netherlands back to the UK. The service used was Telecom Gold, BT's commercial online messaging platform connected to the international Dialcom network — a pre-internet email system that survived into the 1990s before being displaced. The clip is a vivid time capsule highlighting how dramatically information technology changed in just a decade.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://hackaday.com/2026/05/24/the-email-of-the-future-in-1986>

---

Tags: [#retrocomputing](https://daily.dev/tags/retrocomputing)

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