Prestel
In 1983, the Prestel messaging service known as “Prestel Mailbox” was launched, initially hosted on the computer known as "Enterprise", and later available from all IRC computers by means of a centralised messaging computer known as "Pandora". This facility extended the original day one concept of “Response Frames” whereby an end user could send a message back to the IP who owned the page via special pages, for example to order goods or services. The user’s name, address, telephone number, and date could be added automatically to the message when the IP set up the response frame by means of codes which triggered extraction of key data from the users account held on the IRC computer. Initially response frames were ingathered by an IP from each IRC individually, but later the facility to collect messages from all IRCs at the UDC from where they could be ingathered centrally was implemented, and with the introduction of Mailbox, they could be retrieved from any IRC.
Dot-decimal notation
A popular implementation of IP networking, originating in 4.2BSD, contains a function "inet_aton()" for converting IP addresses in character string representation to internal binary storage. In addition to the basic four-decimals format and full 32-bit addresses, it also supported intermediate syntax forms of "octet.24bits" (e.g. 10.1234567; for Class A addresses) and "octet.octet.16bits" (e.g. 172.16.12345; for Class B addresses). It also allowed the numbers to be written in hexadecimal and octal, by prefixing them with 0x and 0, respectively. These features continue to be supported by software until today, even though they are seen as non-standard. But this also means addresses where an IP address component is written with a leading zero digit may be interpreted differently by different programs: some will ignore the leading zero, some will interpret the number as octal.