Brian Houghton
I've just been looking at your web page. The names are so much more romantic somehow than the numbers we have now.
When I was growing up my parents' number was LAB 4418. I used to think (aged 5) that this was because we had a Laburnum tree in our back garden. As we lived at least a mile from the Winchmore Hill exchange, I now don't think this was the reason!
I came to your site because for some reason I remembered this and was trying to find out where the exchange name did originate. No news there unfortunately.
A couple of other things I did notice while I was looking over the page:
My father was a shopkeeper, his number was BOW 3610, but his shop was in Tottenham, nowhere near Twickenham.
The Enfield exchange KEAts was presumably because the poet John Keats attended school in the town. One of the houses at my school in nearby Edmonton was Keats House, so he is still remembered in the area.
Hope that this is of some interest. I enjoyed looking at your page.
Regards,
Brian Houghton
***************************
Houghton Safety Services
Ware
Hertfordshire
When I was growing up my parents' number was LAB 4418. I used to think (aged 5) that this was because we had a Laburnum tree in our back garden. As we lived at least a mile from the Winchmore Hill exchange, I now don't think this was the reason!
I came to your site because for some reason I remembered this and was trying to find out where the exchange name did originate. No news there unfortunately.
A couple of other things I did notice while I was looking over the page:
My father was a shopkeeper, his number was BOW 3610, but his shop was in Tottenham, nowhere near Twickenham.
The Enfield exchange KEAts was presumably because the poet John Keats attended school in the town. One of the houses at my school in nearby Edmonton was Keats House, so he is still remembered in the area.
Hope that this is of some interest. I enjoyed looking at your page.
Regards,
Brian Houghton
***************************
Houghton Safety Services
Ware
Hertfordshire
posted by RWH at 16.11.04
1 Comments:
An interesting note.. back when the GPO were setting up the Prestel viewdata network in the 1980s, they used multiple local computers to handle the demand. Their names were Dickens and Keats (Birmingham) Dryden and Kipling (London) Derwent and Enterprise (London) and later Bronte and Elliot. Also, behind the scenes, Duke and Pandora for the editors and electronic mail. Maybe they were named in homage for some of the old exchange names..
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