Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
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Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#2Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the "porn" (mostly text or chat based, some very creative "graphical" stuff), ...). Then those scams become so pervasive that trust in the system is completely lost, which makes it useless. Three, rapid mass abandonment when even a lower quality "free" alternative becomes available (internet over slow modems, hell, even BBSes posed a serious challenge to minitel).
The thing people always forget to mention is that minitel was metered. Every second you spent on minitel was charged, with some part of that charge shared with the content provider. There were also content providers (ie. "webshops") that paid for the customers to be able to be on their site for free.
The reaction to increased scams ? Why France Telecom stared charging more, of course, making the scams worse ... and worse ... and worse. Then suddenly all was abandoned in 2003 or so, with only paid-for sites remaining (essentially web banking, and some stock broker type stuff that's similar but more complex than web banking).
Of course, the whole exercise was repeated with "value added services" on Cell phones in the late 90s and early 2000s (also charged by the "time spent online", and also filled to the brim with scams), and now again with android and iphone.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#3For those who are interesting in "Minitel revival", a guy did some great job recreating a Minitel server !
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#4Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the "porn" (mostly text or chat based, so…
Hi,
i disagree.
A (dumb) terminal in each french house.
For free !
in the 80's!
As we had one in every house, there was "online" services which were very popular. Like school registration and ordering. And nationwide yellow pages! 24/7 ! Without the need to get to the post office to check for the county directory, on opening hours .
It was also a wonderful tool to connect people in communities. There was different rate charge and the cheapest were very low. I remember spending nights and nights chatting. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTEL
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#5Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the "porn" (mostly text or chat based, so…
Where there's brass, there's muck. I doubt it's even possible to create a system that's universally useful while not being susceptible to scams and all the other crappy bits of humanity.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#6We were running a multi-user text adventure on Prestel at the time, and BT wanted to put it Minitel (in a lot of ways, Minitel was Prestel done right - at least technically). Cue some days in Paris running around with a 'portable' Panasonic PC that must've weighed 25lbs; 4.77MHz, orange plasma screen and 2 ISA slots, one of which was used to hold the full-length X25 card used to connect to Minitel. I got a lot out of that visit (mostly increased upper-body strength).
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#7One of the "funny" thing with the minitel was it was originally designed to be a set of services. During the first experimentations at a city-scale, people used it to find old friends from school ect. Then it ended up with its traffic being mostly directed to erotic services (mostly online chats).
It would be interesting to compare the bandwidth percentage used at the time for those services, and the one from today with Internet.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#8Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the "porn" (mostly text or chat based, so…
Hi, i disagree. A (dumb) terminal in each french house. For free ! in the 80's! As we had one in every house, there was "online" services which were very popular. Like school registration and ordering. And nationwide yellow pages! 24/7 ! Without the need to get to the post office to check for the county directory, on opening hours . It was also a wonderful tool to connect people in communities. There was different ra…
Then, of course, there were the messageries roses (translated roughly as 'pink message areas' - adults only, of course!).
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#9One of the "funny" thing with the minitel was it was originally designed to be a set of services. During the first experimentations at a city-scale, people used it to find old friends from school ect. Then it ended up with its traffic being mostly directed to erotic services (mostly online chats). It would be interesting to compare the bandwidth percentage used at the time for those services, and the one from today w…
Block graphics and text at 1200/75 baud - say 1 million people online and all busy typing, that's 75 x 1E6 x 8 upstream so it wouldn't trouble a single 1Gb ethernet link. Downstream would be 16 times that, so 10Gb would handle it all. Of course, in practice a lot of time the line would be idle so actually numbers would have been far less than that.
Prestel in the UK (very similar to Minitel, also 1200/75) ran on around 10 GEC 'mainframes', which I was 'privileged' to spent many hours around. Each mainframe ran at a whole 1MIP, amd there were seried ranks of disk and tape drives to accompany them.
Edit: Number formatting.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#10I seem to recall Minitel was cracked, too, and used to spread spoof stock prices? Read about it in high school in the 90s but can't find anything about it on Google.