Letter: Letter: Paper tiger

From JULIAN NOTT

With reference to your leading article about British Telecom (Comment,
12 January), I suggest that Telecom Gold, its electronic mail, confirms
many of your comments. The service is dreadful.

My favourite joke is the ‘Info’ section. Try entering ‘Info Access’;
the response starts: ‘Please set paper to top of form and hit space .’
Paper? Does the company think we still use teletype machines? Amazingly
it does: the page length is 66 lines. With the normal 25 line personal computer
screen you cannot read what is sent.

If you waste time saving the file, you find ‘Info access’ ends with
an example: ‘country name eg: Info access USA’. Try the example and you
get: ‘No info on USA’. That one has been there a long time. They are probably
too worried about the scarcity of teletype paper rolls to fix it.

May I recommend Compuserve, now readily accessible in Britain. You won’t
believe the difference until you try it.

Julian Nott London