tech treasure? Seriously? Nostalgia aside, it was slow and expensive to use. Internet had no penetration in France at the time so a crappy solution that does things worse and made France late to pick up Internet afterwards hardly qualifies as a treasure in my book.
Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
21–30 of 68 posts
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#22FWIW, 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.
AZERTY really is a terrible layout though, I can't find anything it's good at, not even typing french. You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance. If you're programming you're going to have the alt-gr key pressed half the time but admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric.
But hey, you can type 'µ' with a single unmodified keystroke!
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#23One 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 :-)
I remember traveling through France and seeing these enormous billboards. It was not simply that the word CUM was emblazoned upon them but the imagery was quite "sexy". So yes it was quite surprising to see contrasting it to my rural Irish background...
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#24tech treasure? Seriously? Nostalgia aside, it was slow and expensive to use. Internet had no penetration in France at the time so a crappy solution that does things worse and made France late to pick up Internet afterwards hardly qualifies as a treasure in my book.
The Minitel service was rolled out 1978-1982, about a dozen years before widespread commercial adoption of Internet connections for consumers in any country. So the Internet penetration is not really relevant here.
Yes, existing legacy technology sometimes works so well that newer things have a hard time replacing it.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#25FWIW, 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.
AZERTY really is a terrible layout though, I can't find anything it's good at, not even typing french. You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance. If you're programming you're going to have the alt-gr key pressed half the time but admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric. But hey, you can type 'µ' with a single unmodified keystroke!
> You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance
That's a limitation on Windows (and macOS?). On Linux, CAPS LOCK + é = É ; etc.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#26FWIW, 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.
AZERTY really is a terrible layout though, I can't find anything it's good at, not even typing french. You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance. If you're programming you're going to have the alt-gr key pressed half the time but admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric. But hey, you can type 'µ' with a single unmodified keystroke!
On Linux, CAPS-LOCK + é produce É. Ithink it works on Mac OS too. Only windows doesn't handle it.
But I do agree, Azerty is not that good most of the time. Especially when it comes to programming.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#27FWIW, 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.
AZERTY really is a terrible layout though, I can't find anything it's good at, not even typing french. You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance. If you're programming you're going to have the alt-gr key pressed half the time but admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric. But hey, you can type 'µ' with a single unmodified keystroke!
È and À are actually easy to write: the grave accent ` is ALT GR + è, then type your letter.
Special thought for the ù letter, which has its own key even though it's only used in one French word 'où' (ok, we use this word fairly often, but still).
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
AZERTY really is a terrible layout though, I can't find anything it's good at, not even typing french. You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance. If you're programming you're going to have the alt-gr key pressed half the time but admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric. But hey, you can type 'µ' with a single unmodified keystroke!
On Linux, CAPS-LOCK + é produce É. Ithink it works on Mac OS too. Only windows doesn't handle it. But I do agree, Azerty is not that good most of the time. Especially when it comes to programming.
You can use the following link (in french) to be able to do it on Windows:
http://chrisbertrand.net/fr/articles/clavier_fr_esp_maj.html
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#29Minitel: 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.
Sure there is! It's actually pretty easy. Just send me the shipping costs by wire transfer and I'll post you a book that explains how.
Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]
#30I recently bought a Minitel (v2 I think). Any ideas about what to do with it? I'm thinking something with a Raspberry Pi.