TELSTAR – What’s in a Name

Telstar, the instrumental by The Tornados ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar), was released in 1962 and became the number 1 selling single in the UK charts, it reached the number 1 spot in the U.S in the same week. Contrary to popular opinion and despite the Telstar videotex service running on a Tornado server, the service is not named after this particular namesake. Telstar is actually named after a BBS with the same name that operated during the 1980s, that service was named after one of its creators, Terry Slater. Telstar is an anagram of T Slater.

Currer, Ellis, Acton and Monty

Prestel Servers were typically named after authors that originated from the area the server was located. The Telstar server names, Currer, Ellis and Acton are of course the pseudonyms used by the Bronte sisters, who like the author of Telstar, originated from Yorkshire.

The development system is called Monty. This name may appear in screen shots etc. The name Monty was selected due to the fact that Telstar is written using the Python programming language. Python was of course named after Monty Python.