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France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

nytimes.com

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Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#11

Post by jgrahamc »

galactus wrote: post #8
mikecane wrote: post #7

Everyone hailed Minitel in the 1980s. It was touted as an example of what gov't should do (these were also the days of Japan, Inc. kicking everyone's ass, also showing what gov't "should" do for industry). Yet along came the Black Swan of the Internet to slay it. Central planning never works.

Wasn't "the internet" created by the gouvernment too?

The early days of Internet were funded by the US government but not in the same way as Minitel. The French government massively subsidized the deployment of Minitel by giving away millions of terminals (in exchange for not giving the subscriber the white pages on paper) and that helped launch it.

But if you ignore the arguments about who funded what there are lots of aspects of Minitel that are interesting because it helped to kick off the wide use of smart cards, the underlying network was packet switched (X.25) and the servers handling Minitel were distributed through the network (so service providers ran their own services).

It wouldn't view Minitel as a failure, however, just because it was replaced by the web. The French were years (probably 10) ahead of the rest of the world in terms of electronic communication and commerce. They had a large internal market online in the 1980s handling a huge amount of commerce.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#13

Post by mikecane »

Klinky wrote: post #10
mikecane wrote: post #7

Everyone hailed Minitel in the 1980s. It was touted as an example of what gov't should do (these were also the days of Japan, Inc. kicking everyone's ass, also showing what gov't "should" do for industry). Yet along came the Black Swan of the Internet to slay it. Central planning never works.

Central planning never works. But the Internet was the spin-off of a centrally planned government network. I am not sure it's accurate to say the failure of "competing" services was due to the failures of central planning, but more related to the onward march of technology(cheaper & faster). Even now the Internet is far from decentralized & some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary.

>>>some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary.

Which all tend to eventually fail. The Source, CompuServe, Delphi, AOL, all failed.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#14

Post by snippyhollow »

jgrahamc wrote: post #5
alx wrote: post #4

I'm from Tetalab, a hackerspace in Toulouse, France, and we still use the minitel for some hacks with arduino: http://www.tetalab.org/images/tetalab/MSM.jpg It's a neat interface, everybody here in France remember it from the 80's, and it quite easy to hack it. We should soon release an arduino lib for eveybody to hack it, but it'll be quite hard to find a minitel if you're not in France (nobody use it anymore, it's…

C'est ou ça à Toulouse? J'habitais à Toulouse (l'hyper-centre) pendant trois ans.

Je pense que c'est ici http://www.mixart-myrys.org // http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Mixart-Myrys+toulouse&hl=f... :)

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#16

Post by nodata »

Klinky wrote: post #10
mikecane wrote: post #7

Everyone hailed Minitel in the 1980s. It was touted as an example of what gov't should do (these were also the days of Japan, Inc. kicking everyone's ass, also showing what gov't "should" do for industry). Yet along came the Black Swan of the Internet to slay it. Central planning never works.

Central planning never works. But the Internet was the spin-off of a centrally planned government network. I am not sure it's accurate to say the failure of "competing" services was due to the failures of central planning, but more related to the onward march of technology(cheaper & faster). Even now the Internet is far from decentralized & some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary.

The Internet became the success it is now once it escaped from being a centrally planned government network.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#17

Post by LaGrange »

mikecane wrote: post #7

Everyone hailed Minitel in the 1980s. It was touted as an example of what gov't should do (these were also the days of Japan, Inc. kicking everyone's ass, also showing what gov't "should" do for industry). Yet along came the Black Swan of the Internet to slay it. Central planning never works.

Except the cases where central planning works, like (DUH!) Minitel (until the internet came, it didn't fail, it just got upgraded, duh), going to the Moon (distributed attempt at reaching the moon, also known as the living pyramid), justice system (as soon as you introduce the ability for appeal), the Internet, DNS system (it may be not centralized, but it is centrally planned), Google, Apple, and your own consciousness.

Central planning never works.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#18

Post by kahawe »

With prestel, BTX and MUPID there were quite a few prior technologies but to my knowledge, this only really took off like that in France due to substantial public funding.

Prestel in UK died and BTX in Germany/Austria was but a novelty AFAIR. I have never seen BTX being widely used here but when I was on vacation in France, sure enough even the rest stops on the highway had a few minitel terminals you could pay for. And that was around 94 or 95 when the internet has already been heard of around here in Europe and the first ISPs started popping up.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#19

Post by kahawe »

alx wrote: post #4

I'm from Tetalab, a hackerspace in Toulouse, France, and we still use the minitel for some hacks with arduino: http://www.tetalab.org/images/tetalab/MSM.jpg It's a neat interface, everybody here in France remember it from the 80's, and it quite easy to hack it. We should soon release an arduino lib for eveybody to hack it, but it'll be quite hard to find a minitel if you're not in France (nobody use it anymore, it's…

How difficult would it be to make a proxy for it and make minitel accessible world wide? Do they bill you per minute?

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#20

Post by [deleted] »

mikecane wrote: post #7

Everyone hailed Minitel in the 1980s. It was touted as an example of what gov't should do (these were also the days of Japan, Inc. kicking everyone's ass, also showing what gov't "should" do for industry). Yet along came the Black Swan of the Internet to slay it. Central planning never works.

[deleted]
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