FWIW, my engineering school's IT team still has Minitels in use in their various server rooms, because it can be used as serial console for a variety of devices (you know, just in case everything is broken and physical presence is required). The Retrocave Man should be able to do the same and enjoy our AZERTY keyboard.
Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
11–20 of 68 posts
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#12One 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 arou…
I think they were more interested in how the relative percentages of bandwidth usage by type (erotic versus other uses) compares to today's patterns.
I'd hazard a guess that people have generally been equally interested in sex over the years. :) Although I do wonder what the gender demographic split was like back then online, again I'd hazard a guess at a greater proportion of males compared with today.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#13One 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…
as a kid I remember vividly two uses:
- online phone book - video games magazine services for news, tips and most importantly prize winning contest (with no luck)
we all knew about the online erotic chat (lots of public billboard with explicit enough colors to get the message across) but for some reason neither I nor my friends ever got interested in trying them. Oh maybe they were pay before use anyway... that would have interesting consequences when your parents review the phone bill afterwards.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#14The irony is even stronger if you consider that Louis Pouzin was a strong inspirator of packet based communications (having just done the cyclades network system) and TCP/IP but for some reason the French national telecom agency didn't believe in it and stuck with a different protocol for too long.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#15If you like that video, you might enjoy this great book about Minitel:
https://www.amazon.com/Minitel-Welcome-Internet-Platform-Stu...
I have started to read it, but haven't made it all the way through. I love tech history and the book is great so far!
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#16One 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…
Speaking about erotic services it might be funny for Anglo-Saxons to know there was a (serious) dating service named 3615 CUM.
Of course they used the latin word "cum" that means "with" ...
They had giant advertising posters all over France, and I am sure quite a few English speaking visitors must had wondered about French mores :-)
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#17The irony is even stronger if you consider that Louis Pouzin was a strong inspirator of packet based communications (having just done the cyclades network system) and TCP/IP but for some reason the French national telecom agency didn't believe in it and stuck with a different protocol for too long.
My understanding is that telecom in general balked at packet switching. To them it violated the core tenent of their business, that of maintaining a continous circuit between customers.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#18FWIW, my engineering school's IT team still has Minitels in use in their various server rooms, because it can be used as serial console for a variety of devices (you know, just in case everything is broken and physical presence is required). The Retrocave Man should be able to do the same and enjoy our AZERTY keyboard.
https://imgur.com/a/R6pFi
Yep, the adapter is easy to build. The minitel character set also has some handy glyphs in it for graphics.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#19Minitel: 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…
I used to work as a system's engineer for the biggest service provider of the minitel era, back in 1989+. MOST of the services were for professionals -- in fact the biggest by far for volume and revenue was a transport exchange for lorries...
There were a few 'pink services' (can't call that porn really, it was just chatbots with (sometimes!) real 'hostesses') as mentioned, but they were nowhere near the biggest. The biggest after the lorry service were sport services (Stade 2 etc during footy times or Tour de France) -- then .gov stuff and education (exam results).
I think for most people the 'pink services' were the ones that were advertised most, therefore there is a bias as to what was used and popular at the time, but from my point of view, it was nowhere near as popular as what people believe.
For the technically minded, we were running a (lot) of Pr1me computers running Primos -- in fact we were their primary customers before they died; we eventually moved on to HPUX on the very first PA-RISC that came out. The Pr1mes continued ticking along for a long while...
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 arou…
I think they were more interested in how the relative percentages of bandwidth usage by type (erotic versus other uses) compares to today's patterns. I'd hazard a guess that people have generally been equally interested in sex over the years. :) Although I do wonder what the gender demographic split was like back then online, again I'd hazard a guess at a greater proportion of males compared with today.
I strongly suspect the interactive (mostly adult) services were the bulk of the bandwidth; the rest of it was relatively short, infrequent and low-bandwidth sessions like looking up phone numbers, catalogue ordering or paying the odd bill. There's some info in the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances) about usage and finance which quotes revenues of over $1bn p.a. in 1998.
I'd guess that while interest in sex hasn't changed, it does seem the bulk of bandwidth on Minitel went on online chat (erotic/flirting) - likely much more so as a proportion of the total than on the modern internet. I recall Paris (and the Metro in particular) at that time being plastered with (mostly-pink) adverts for 3615 chat services (the Minitel equivalent of a URL).