Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)

Notably a core plot device in the French Home Alone style film Deadly Games (aka Dial Code Santa).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Games_(film)

If anything it was so far ahead of the early web that it hindered adoption of the WWW in France. It was incredibly good and rich, many services that could be used by non-technical people and had a built in monetization system for information providers. It took at least until 1996 before the web could compete and by that time France reluctantly started to let go of their beloved tiny terminals. It took until 2012 (!!) before it was finally decommissioned, but by then there really wasn't much left of it to be turned off.

I’m surprised how little the histories of the web include the contribution of the French tech sector for DSL, the technology that made computer networks easy to expand to every house, and the general idea that the Internet could be a domestic technology. Until the late 80s, the Internet was a military and gradually academic tool, but even until the mid-90s, having an internet connection at home was quaint outside of France where accessing your official records, buying certain things online was a convenient reality. TCP/IP and Tier 1 networks were only one half of the story, and the far smaller, easier half: connecting every country is a matter of a few big projects; connecting everyone is something, that to this day, many still struggle with.

There’s an occasional mention of Cepremades as an inspiration for the Internet Protocol, some technicality about Alohanet, but never a history of why that should be in everyone’s living room, except a mysterious prescient and unhelpful AOL, their omnipresent CD, and nothing about the government-sponsored, centralised project to make cheap modulator-demodulator use long copper wires — something that proved both incredibly difficult and relevant.

A friend showed me Minitel in 1994, and I was half-surprised, half-not-surprised that even on this entirely text-based system, there was still porn (or at least, "visual erotica"). Human nature, eh?