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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)

#81

Post by Orphis »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #52
p_l wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

While PPPoE worked on WinXP, driver support when transitioning to XP was quite a big issue for some. I still remember hacking the inf files to get my modem work on it as an early adopter.

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

#82

Post by spullara »

miniwark wrote: post #66
sailingparrot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's only partly true, many people indeed have a Minitel at home, because it was free to have one (like it was free to have a landline phone). You only had to pay for the usage. And there was great services not yet available on WWW : find the train timetable, find the phone number of someone, chat with a (fake) sexy girl... As for the PC penetration, there was many, but most of them where not ready for network usage…

I spent a good proportion of my youth using a modem on C64/C128 connecting to BBSs.

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

#84

Post by pengaru »

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

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

Not really, Windows For Workgroups 3.11 offered an addon called Wolverine [0] but it wasn't even included by default AFAIK. Win95 is where TCP/IP support became normal for Windows.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x#Windows_for_Workg...

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

#86

Post by wolverine876 »

miki123211 wrote: post #6

Let'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.

> abstract notion of privacy

What's abstract about it?

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

#87

Post by kingcharles »

dmix wrote: post #39
markharper wrote: post #3

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)

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.

WTF did I just watch O_O. And as a Brit I'm intimately familiar with much French cinema, but this was awesome. I have to watch this now.

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

#88

Post by kingcharles »

wmf wrote: post #70
ulkesh wrote: post #50

I currently work for the person who helped start US Videotel and I still haven't scratched much of the surface about all of it with him. Everything about Minitel and US Videotel reminds me of what was depicted in seasons 2 and 3 of Halt and Catch Fire . I always wondered if Minitel was their inspiration for the Mutiny software.

To me Mutiny looks like Lucasfilm Habitat down to the UI and C64 platform. https://twitter.com/wwwploguecom/status/628896016381685760 http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html

This reminds me of Microsoft Comic Chat, arguably the greatest contribution Microsoft made to computer science:

https://chrisgliddon.com/a-trip-down-memory-lane-microsoft-c...

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

#89

Post by kingcharles »

bernardlunn wrote: post #21

And in UK we had Prestel, also ahead of its time but run by a telco and disrupted by the PC. I woz there, said the old Geezer

I'd forgotten Prestel. Didn't Prestel have one of the first Internet gateways in the UK? I seem to cast my mind back to the early 90s and the few hundred of us on the Internet mostly had Prestel IPs.
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