Keith Clarke, photographed in 2017 at a Viewdata/Prestel re-union, holding a picture of him as he was in 1979.
keith clarke, born 1940
telecommunications engineer
Keith Clarke followed his father into a career as a telecommunications engineer in the Post Office - which became British Telecom when it was separated from the postal service in 1981. He worked in the research department under Sam Fedida, inventor of Viewdata. This technology was used to launch British Telecom’s Prestel service, a precursor of the internet which provided thousands of pages of information on television screens. He succeeded Fedida as leader of the Viewdata technical team. His later career at British Telecom included a period as Senior Vice President Engineering at Datacom, a British Telecom subsidiary in San Jose, California. Keith Clarke died in London in July 2023.
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