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

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

#51

Post by dang »

Some past related threads (if anyone's curious):

Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004616 - Oct 2021 (2 comments)

Old School Minitel Laptop: 7 Steps (With Pictures) – Instructables - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861842 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)

Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794257 - Oct 2021 (3 comments)

The Rise and Fall of Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507260 - Dec 2020 (23 comments)

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744 - Sept 2020 (196 comments)

Log on Like It’s 1985: A Fragment of Minitel Returns - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820 - Dec 2018 (9 comments)

Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093 - Jan 2018 (67 comments)

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405 - Oct 2017 (15 comments)

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561 - July 2017 (107 comments)

Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881 - June 2017 (53 comments)

Minitel, France's precursor to the Web, to go dark 30/6/12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141 - June 2012 (32 comments)

Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531 - June 2012 (21 comments)

How France fell out of love with Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360 - June 2012 (1 comment)

France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106 - July 2011 (46 comments)

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

#52

Post by JPLeRouzic »

p_l wrote: post #30
JPLeRouzic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m surprised how little the histories of the web include the contribution of the French tech sector for DSL Do you mean for digital technologies or for specifically DSL? As I remember up to 1996 there was no commercial DSL in France, but there were excellent ISDN coverage (with rate up to 128kbits/sec with two channels). However it was quite expensive and when DSL was commercialized in France, it was cheaper at th…

regarding ATM and DSL - A lot of setups in Europe apparently used PPPoA, not PPPoE, meaning your DSL line integrated easily with the ATM network on the backbone from my understanding.

Thanks, In France it started with PPPoA, yet quickly it moved to PPPoE (~1999). People indeed used PCs not minitels to connect to the new thing of the time (Internet). At the time there was a need to update PCs as most individual or family customers had Windows 98. My experience is that it added instabilities to PC with Win98 where if I remember correctly PPPoE worked out of the box with Win2K and WinXP (it's was a long time ago). Anyway most home PCs of the time where not to able to deal with the speed of ADSL. I remember that the owner of a restaurant in Rennes wanted us to pay them a new PC!

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

#53

Post by elzbardico »

908B64B197 wrote: post #32
jacquesm wrote: post #5

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 (!!)…

> 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.

Why singleout apple, when our lives are surrounded by digital subscriptions from a lot of other companies too? Office, Netflix, Youtube Premium, Spotify, Blackblaze etc, etc...

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

#54

Post by 123pie123 »

fmajid wrote: post #40
jacquesm wrote: post #5

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 (!!)…

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 T…

MS Windows 3.11 came with TCP/IP winsocks, MS Windows 3.1 didn't

but that was the same for all countries

I had the painful job of getting Windows running with netware ie IPX also with TCP/IP

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

#55

Post by karmakaze »

123pie123 wrote: post #54
fmajid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 T…

MS Windows 3.11 came with TCP/IP winsocks, MS Windows 3.1 didn't but that was the same for all countries I had the painful job of getting Windows running with netware ie IPX also with TCP/IP

I remember those days, travelling with a Win 3.1 laptop and a PPP stack with Winsock.dll to use dial-up in various countries. And 1-1 direct text chat apps.

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

#57

Post by agumonkey »

jacquesm wrote: post #5

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 (!!)…

I still think it's better for the average people. It's also frugal oriented. You won't have youtube or google maps but for simple searches or orders I think it was peak. Just give it a speed bump and you're good.

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

#58

Post by trasz »

sailingparrot wrote: post #44
fmajid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 T…

> The bigger hindrance was relatively low PC penetration compared to the UK, Netherlands or Germany. Wasn't that, in part, due to the fact that many people in France already had a Minitel at home?

In pre-internet times the purpose of a PC was quite different from electronic communication, so I’d guess people ought to have them anyway… It’s a good question, though, why was that.

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

#59

Post by trasz »

elzbardico wrote: post #53
908B64B197 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why singleout apple, when our lives are surrounded by digital subscriptions from a lot of other companies too? Office, Netflix, Youtube Premium, Spotify, Blackblaze etc, etc...

Because Apple has an ecosystem, whereas the others you mentioned live within someone else’s ecosystems.

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

#60

Post by jacquesm »

agumonkey wrote: post #57
jacquesm wrote: post #5

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 (!!)…

I still think it's better for the average people. It's also frugal oriented. You won't have youtube or google maps but for simple searches or orders I think it was peak. Just give it a speed bump and you're good.

Zero eye candy, and 1KB pages. Imagine how fast those would load on today's hardware.
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