The arrival of satellite television and telephone links was perhaps the defining moment in the creation of the global village.
Being able to share television images and events with a global audience of two billion or more completely transforms the scale of international events - making each one potentially world-changing.
The new technology allows families to remain in contact, as they become more widely dispersed. At the same time, businesses have expanded their supply and customer bases beyond recognition.
From the invention of the electric telegraph, telecommunications has progressively made it possible for markets and businesses to operate on a bigger and bigger scale. Now corporations and markets have become global - dwarfing most nations and making individual governments increasingly powerless to control these operations.
The end result has been more international collaboration at all levels - and the creation of an increasingly interdependent world.
Mrs Josie Ridley was born in 1922 in south-east London but her family moved to Southampton where she grew up. The telephone was quite alien to her and she didn't see her first phone box until she was 12.
She joined the GPO aged 16 to work as an operator. After 10 years she applied for a position in Nigeria, where she became a telephone supervisor and worked for 21 years.
She remembers when the Queen came on a royal visit and the preparations they had to make in advance.
Play the audio clip and view the transcript to learn more. A new window will open.Gerry Milsted joined the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in the thick of the Second World War during 1943. He remained working with the organisation until 1985, after it had become BT. Gerry was a signals expert with a high aptitude for Morse Code, which he could send at 34 words per minute.
After the war he handled radio traffic from all over the world and he remembers one call from the Royal Yacht "Britannia", where he told the Queen to get off the line.
Play the audio clip and view the transcript to learn more. A new window will open.In October 1946 Pat Hastings joined the GPO where he worked for forty three years, becoming a Technical Officer.
Pat has been involved with many of the modern developments in telecommunications, from transatlantic telephone cables to satellite communications. He talks about some of the global events that have helped to shape the changes made in the industry.
Play the audio clip and view the transcript to learn more. A new window will open.
Engineers were faced with a problem if customers complained that their telephone signal was too weak. How could they test, objectively, if that was the case. It was possible to listen to the quality of the sound produced but hard to know if it was poor because someone was just speaking too quietly.
They solved the problem with this wind up noisemaker. The grill was placed in front of the mouthpiece and the button on the top was pushed. The unit let out a loud, steady, grating noise at a fixed volume and sound quality that provided a reasonable basis to test the sound transmission.
