The Manchester Host was an early example of a municipal networking project. Its aim was to foster social and economic development in

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

by encouraging the use of on-line communications and information services by businesses, public sector and voluntary organisations. The project was launched in 1990 by a partnership of

Manchester City Council Manchester City Council is the local authority for Manchester, a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. Manchester is the sixth largest city in England by population. Its city council is composed of 96 councillors, three ...

, The Centre for Employment Research at Manchester Polytechnic (later

Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester Metropolitan University is located in the centre of Manchester, England. The university has over 40,000 students and over 4,000 members of staff. It is home to four faculties (Arts and Humanities, Business and Law, Health and Educat ...

), and

Poptel Poptel was initially an email and bulletin board service, and later a British internet and on-line services provider that was run by an employee cooperative (worker cooperative) from 1986 to 2002. In the 1980s Poptel offered on-line communicati ...

. At its core was an email and database service, accessible locally via dial-up and via the international

X.25 X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet-switched data communication in wide area networks (WAN). It was originally defined by the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT, now ITU-T) in a series of drafts ...

-network globally. The email service used equipment provided by German company

GeoNet GeoNet was an early international on-line services network built using microcomputers. Based on software developed in Germany by GeoNet Systems GmbH in the early 1980s, and completed in the early 1990s, it was one of the first networks to offer a ...

. A free-text database was accessed by what we'd now call a 'search engine' provided by a company called Memex. The project involved a number of parallel activities including the establishment of "Electronic Village Halls": drop-in centres where users could learn about the new online communications and information ("

telematics Telematics is an interdisciplinary field encompassing telecommunications, vehicular technologies ( road transport, road safety, etc.), electrical engineering (sensors, instrumentation, wireless communications, etc.), and computer science (multimedi ...

") technology; and the creation of the Manchester Community Information Network. These included the Bangladesh EVH, Chorlton EVH and the Women's EVH. The Manchester Host has been cited as an important example of the use of technology for economic development.Steve Woolgar, Sociedad virtual?: tecnología, "cibérbole", realida
2005
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References

External links

Manchester Community Information Network websiteManchester City Council websiteManchester Metropolitan University Website
Former internet service providers of the United Kingdom Organisations based in Manchester {{compu-network-stub