21–30 of 57 posts
Don't forget Plato. That was my first experience with a networked computer. In about 1985 in Escanaba Michigan no less.
I remember chatting with someone on the Dungeons and dragons type Wizardry game & learning they were in California. Whoa! ( I was about 10 or 11 )
The real minitel was a public domain modem comms program for MS-DOS/PC-DOS created by the brilliant Tom Jennings in 1983 (the FidoNet guy).
Minitel had one huge drawback: it was too good. It put France a solid 4 years behind the rest of the world when the web hit. Everything in France was done via Minitel, and in the beginning the web was still so small and capable of much less that the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they already had. But that changed rapidly and before long the head start turned into a lag and a ton of ine…
Minitel had one huge drawback: it was too good. It put France a solid 4 years behind the rest of the world when the web hit. Everything in France was done via Minitel, and in the beginning the web was still so small and capable of much less that the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they already had. But that changed rapidly and before long the head start turned into a lag and a ton of ine…
> the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they already had What they didn't see though was that Internet was a decentralized, truly democratic network unlike Minitel and the likes (e.g. CompuServe, AOL, Bitnet I think?). For its time Minitel was quite good aesthetically and in terms of UI, but as a centralized consumer-oriented network it had no chance to compete with the Internet.
That's the key word: was.
Now that the web has mostly eaten the internet, the network has been centred around a few nodes. And we still have the asymmetric bandwidth that is the primary driver of centralisation.
Make no mistake, the internet has become just a centralised and consumer-oriented than the minitel was. Even I don't host my own web site, for 2 reasons: HTTP doesn't scale, and I don't have enough upload.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they already had What they didn't see though was that Internet was a decentralized, truly democratic network unlike Minitel and the likes (e.g. CompuServe, AOL, Bitnet I think?). For its time Minitel was quite good aesthetically and in terms of UI, but as a centralized consumer-oriented network it had no chance to compete with the Internet.
> Internet was a decentralized That's the key word: was . Now that the web has mostly eaten the internet, the network has been centred around a few nodes. And we still have the asymmetric bandwidth that is the primary driver of centralisation. Make no mistake, the internet has become just a centralised and consumer-oriented than the minitel was. Even I don't host my own web site, for 2 reasons: HTTP doesn't scale, an…
CDNs are becoming a cheap commodity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they already had What they didn't see though was that Internet was a decentralized, truly democratic network unlike Minitel and the likes (e.g. CompuServe, AOL, Bitnet I think?). For its time Minitel was quite good aesthetically and in terms of UI, but as a centralized consumer-oriented network it had no chance to compete with the Internet.
It was not totally centralized technically. You could host your own full service, using your own modem banks and servers. The drawback was that you would not be discoverable in the minitel directory and you would not get the billing system etc. People needed to know your phone number and dial it to connect. Minitel took a long time to die because it was a cash cow, both for France Telecom and service providers. The e…
People got minitels (available for free) because phone books were eliminated, so even people not interested by the online world (shopping, train/flight reservations, dating "sites", high school diploma results, weather forecast, etc...), would get one in order to be able to look up phone numbers.
I've always wondered how much Tim Berners-Lee was inspired by Minitel given the fact that he must have frequently seen or even used them in the area around CERN.
Minitel had one huge drawback: it was too good. It put France a solid 4 years behind the rest of the world when the web hit. Everything in France was done via Minitel, and in the beginning the web was still so small and capable of much less that the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they already had. But that changed rapidly and before long the head start turned into a lag and a ton of ine…
Comcast is in the middle of rolling out gigabit everywhere after Google lit a fire under their butts, so I guess we'll catch up with the rest of the world eventually in our own stumbling, expensive way.