Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#51

Post by bigbugbag » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 12:18 PM UTC

okket wrote: post #17

Xoros wrote: post #10

As stated by Jacquesm, Minitel slowed down Internet deployment in France. Every bank, mail ordering sellers or alike already had their Minitel "site" (in which they invested money) so jumping in the new train took time. At the end of the 90's, I had to develop a Minitel Emulator for a French bank who wanted to put PC based kiosks where people could have many informations (static coded texts) but also connect to their…

Just for the record: We had a similar experience with banks in Germany, it was called "Bildschirmtext" or "BTX". It took a long time and a lot of emulators until they finally adopted the Internet. Besides this, BTX was not as omnipresent as Minitel was in France.

  "Bildschirmtext" (BTX) is almost as old as Minitel and 
  technically very similar, but it was largely unsuccessful 
  because consumers had to buy expensive decoders to use it. 
  The German postal service held a monopoly on the decoders 
  that prevented competition and lower prices. Few people 
  bought the boxes, so there was little incentive for 
  companies to post content, which in turn did nothing to 
  further box sales. When the monopoly was loosened, it was 
  too late because PC-based online services had started to 
  appear.

http://www.liquisearch.com/minitel/minitel_in_other_countrie...

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#52

Post by bigbugbag » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 2:06 PM UTC

arnaudsm wrote: post #6

Surprisingly, the Internet is becoming centralized like the Minitel was. Is history repeating itself?

I remember discussions circa 1995 on how the web becoming commercial would ultimately destroy the democratic potential of the internet to mirror the issues of capitalism such as centralizing power and wealth.

In 2003 (was it 2001?) there's the 2nd edition TAZ preface by Hakim Bey[3], in 2007 there's this infamous talk "free internet or minitel 2.0"[1] at the Libre Software Meeting[2]. Closer to now there's RIPE publishing "The death of transit"[3] and recently Peter Sunde told us we have lost the internet and it's all about damage control now.[4]

I would not say it's a surprise, it's simply the consequences of applying the same model that's making our civilisation fail, removing the conditions favorable to life on the planet, causing the current mass extinction, etc.

[1]: https://www.fdn.fr/actions/confs/internet-libre-ou-minitel-2...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libre_Software_Meeting

[3]: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/gih/the-death-of-transit

[4]: https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/06/09/pirate-bay-founder-weve...

[5]: I think perhaps the least useful part of the book is its section on the Internet. I envisioned the net as an adjunct to the TAZ, a technology in service to the TAZ, a means of potentiating its emergences. I proposed the term "Web" for this function of the Net. What a joke. Time magazine identified me as a cyber-guru and "explained" that the TAZ exists in cyberspace. "Web" became the official term for the commercial/surveillane function of the Net, and by 1995 it had succeeded in burying the anarchic potential of the Net (if any really existed) under a mass of advertising and dot-com scams. What's left of the Left now seems to inhabit a ghost-world where a few thousands "hits" pass for political action and "virtual community" takes the place of human presence. The Web has become a perfect mirror of Global Capital: bordeless, triumphalist, evanescent, aesthically bankrupt, monocultural, violent -- a force for atomization and isolation, for the disappearance of knowledge, of sexuality, and of all subtle senses.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#53

Post by bigbugbag » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 3:20 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #8

johnflan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, the Apple app eco system comes to mind.

Apple's apps have nothing to do with an open or closed Internet.

Of course they have.

When you have to use an app and a specific hardware to access content instead of the browser it's an open unless its closed internet (see tapas.io for one such example).

The walled garden model is causing the closed internet.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#54

Post by bigbugbag » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 3:27 PM UTC

flodor wrote: post #40

Minitel was also used a lot for chatrooms (most of them for sexual purposes). Of course most of the women in those chatrooms where men working for the service. A few guys has made a lot of money with it (the creator from "Free" french internet provider). It is extremly funny because on the picture you can see a list of nicknames, it looks like some bdsm chatroom :)

Also Marc Simoncini (creator of meetic), and there's a few others.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#55

Post by bigbugbag » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 3:41 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #24

Interestingly, the minitel solved the monetization problem as visitors would automatically be billed by the phone company at the rate chosen by the service they visited.

Somehow this does not add up with the PTSN era of the internet and with the current options to be billed on your ISP bill such as internet+[1].

[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet+ http://internetplus.fr/

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#56

Post by bigbugbag » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #43

kyberias wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people seem to think that and they have a reason. When apps replace web content, they quite clearly have something to do with the Internet. Web is part of the Internet. Isn't this obvious?

People like the guy I responded to think that because they have an axe to grind against Apple. Notice how he said "Apple's app ecosystem" and not "Android app ecosystem", when Google's platform is just as robust? And didn't Microsoft start it with ActiveX and IE? Or how about "Works best with Netscape Navigator"? But no, it's Apple's fault. Everything is Apple's fault.

Maybe I'm wrong but my interpretation was quite different.

To me he's just pointing out a fact, to me along the 20+ years since I've been aware of the issue many things happened or didn't happen but a few specific things come out of the pack, including the one he cited.

To me you came out as the apple fanboy who cannot stand that apple is part of the issue and that it is undeniably apple who popularized the "app store" model, emblematic of the problem at hands. It's only after apple's success that the others followed suit and copied the model to recreate their own distinct impossible to interconnect ecosystem. Even Mozilla has one now.

Yes Apple is among the GAFAM who are to blame among many others for the current state of things, but ultimately the failure is in us who chose voluntary submission to new masters, who failed to use our technical knowledge to provide to other less technically inclined, who failed to force ISP to offer the means to self host, and so on

I guess this is quite an illustration of "don't argue with fools, from a distance people may not be able to tell the difference".

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#57

Post by bigbugbag » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 4:06 PM UTC

mojuba wrote: post #5

jacquesm wrote: post #2

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.

There was a minitel service "3615 internet" that offered internet access to minitel users, the guy behind this service valentin lacambre used the money to finance altern.org.

Here's an interesting snippet of history from "une contre-histoire des internets": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2hA3Bvm1n4