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Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
31–40 of 127 posts
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#32If 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 (!!)…
> many services that could be used by non-technical people and had a built in monetization system for information providers
There's still a Minitel today: it's the Apple ecosystem.
Minitel demonstrated regular people were willing to buy services on a machine (phone, phone-like terminal, computer) and use it as part of their normal lives.
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#33I own two Minitels. I made a connector (https://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361) that allows me to use one as a serial terminal and it works nicely with a Raspberry Pi/stty. I am in the process of writing my own firmware for the other one.
One of my Minitels acting as a terminal over a serial cable I made... displaying jgc.org via Lynx: https://imgur.com/a/ecmvfMj
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#34Let's not forget that Minitel couldn't be as great as it was if not for its complete and utter centralization. Sometimes having twenty slightly different services that are blocked from interoperating for the sake of some abstract notion of privacy isn't that great after all.
> for the sake of some abstract notion of privacy isn't that great after all.
For some this is not some abstract notion but a real worry. I am glad the internet started decentralised.
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#35Protip: this is where we are at with Web3 right now.
People are excited because they can build, any state you see is not the end all be all, and can be changed... by you! It's also very lucrative, more than FAANG while using a simpler stack to deploy a product, so that will keep attracting builders and their networks.
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#36Hm. Seems like just another implementation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex to me. Which I didn't like that much because of the german https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext , which reminded me of the stuff you could get on TV, like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext Maybe the french stuff was more useful in practice, the german always seemed scammy, somehow.
> Maybe the french stuff was more useful in practice
It was highly pushed by the national telco. The telco lent terminals for free so they were easily available, and there were tons of useful services, especially but not only from national companies: starting from the 80s you had stocks, online shopping, travel reservations, information services, message boards, databases[0], games, dating sites, ...
Monetisation / payment was integrated from the start, through the phone bill: just like premium-rate phone numbers, minitel had premium-rate services (both first and third party), so you could make money out of valuable services. It was nothing compared to the modern web (~25000 services and about $1bn revenue at its height), but for the mid-80s to mid-90s and out of a population of 60m it was quite massive.
[0] trying to get rid of phonebooks was a big reason for minitel in the first place
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#37The Minitel was pretty nice. I saw one in 1989 on a trip to Paris. An important fact hinted at below is: you got the bill as part of your monthly phone bill. Probably the most common use, not all that interesting to us, was replacing 411 (remember that? I don't think that was the Information number in France.) Besides porn, it also had online dating.
> it also had online dating.
In Brazil (São Paulo) we had a similar, Minitel-based, system. No online dating, but I met my first wife in a chatroom. It also had banking and you could transfer money to different banks with it. Initially I got an MSX computer with a modem (at that time the telco rented out the computer instead of a dedicated terminal for a ridiculously low fee), which was also useful for connecting to local BBSs.
Later on I gave the MSX back (should never have done that - it was an unremarkable computer, but a pretty good videogame) and added a V.23 modem to my Apple II+ clone. The system continued to evolve, started accepting 1200 and 2400 bps inbound connections (which made it more accessible, because V.23 modems were not easy to come by). Last time I used it was with Windows 95 and its terminal software.
Legend says the system ran on Multics on a Honeywell-Bull mainframe, making me an actual Multics user.
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#38At this point, Minitel has become kind of Rorschachtest for france, some see forward engineering, some see decline, some bureaucracy... What's great, is one can project almost anything on it.
(disclosure, i'm french)
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#39Notably 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)
The trailer is like a Bizarro world Home Alone https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096741/
Now I’m curious if the Home Alone screenwriter watched it.
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#40If 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 (!!)…
Not really. I worked for France Télécom's Wanadoo ISP division and the Minitel guys tried to sabotage us at every opportunity, including getting the head of our first division CEO Roger Courtois, but they did not manage to slow the progress, even though at the time they had $1B/year in revenues. The bigger hindrance was relatively low PC penetration compared to the UK, Netherlands or Germany.
Fun story: at the time TCP/IP did not ship standard with Windows, so we had to ship CD-ROMs with installers for WinSock, along with a browser (initially Netscape, then IE because it had much better provisioning tools, not because of Microsoft's dirty tricks though they certainly tried). My colleague who was responsible for this was clearly so traumatized he shortly later left the company and joined the Catholic priesthood...