Prestel Monitoring Equipment
In order to proactively manage the potentially large numbers of user connections to Prestel computers, special monitoring equipment was developed by Post Office Research & Development engineers. This was known by the acronym VAMPIRE, short for Viewdata Access Monitor and Priority Incident Reporting Equipment – a title which more or less describes its function. The device used private circuits to link modem ports on each IRC computer or remote multiplexor node, with a display on a Prestel television screen at the Regional Prestel Centre responsible for managing that IRC. The VAMPIRE screen consisted of a matrix of small squares, so arranged that all ports for a single IRC computer could be displayed on a single television with each square representing the state of a port simply by means of the colour. Free ports were shown as green, occupied ports as yellow, incoming calls as pale blue and faulty ports as red, such that the state of a whole Prestel machine or concentrator node could be determined at a glance.
It was apparently planned to extend this facility via a system designated the Data Recording and Concentrator Unit for Line Applications known as DRACULA, which would generate a summary view so that the state of multiple computers could be displayed on a single screen. This device was never deployed since the number of VAMPIRE sets needed to monitor every Prestel computer and concentrator never got beyond a couple of dozen, spread over many Regional Prestel Centre offices.
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