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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)

#91

Post by glandium »

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…

> You only had to pay for the usage

Worth noting there were free services too. The most notable was the white/yellow pages at number 11 (later 36 11), although it was only free for the first 3 minutes, but it usually didn't take that long to find what you wanted. Or if it did, you could just reset the connection.

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

#92

Post by glandium »

thamer wrote: post #43
louissan wrote: post #4

I remember being nearly murdered by my parents after they received the phone bill via the (physical, paper-based in those days :-) ) mail. The minitel promptly was locked out of reach of the family's children .... still, good days. They even had games! 36.15 ...

For context for "36.15": you would access Minitel services by typing a numeric code followed by a short textual name, the most common code being 3615. Advertisements for Minitel services would say something like "Dial 3615 HOTSTUFF to meet a passionate lover". A lot of these services were adult chat, games, or extremely low-res porn, and it was easy to rack up a massive phone bill by connecting to them (you'd have to…

More precisely, the minitel would call 36 15, which would open a page on which you type the short textual name and press enter, which would then connect you to the service you want. And the terminal would tell you the cost per minute of the service.

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

#93

Post by glandium »

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.

It was not, in fact, totally centralized. In the early 90s, my middle school had a server that you could phone into to get the weather (I don't quite remember if it was a full forecast or not, I think it was), and that server was managed by a Maths teacher and students who would enter the school ½h/1h earlier to grab the data and update the page. I guess you could say that was my first experience as what would later be called webmastering.

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

#94

Post by sofixa »

cm2187 wrote: post #23
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 (!!)…

And it solved a problem I’d argue the internet hasn’t solved yet: how to charge users securely, easily and for small amounts. The way it did that is through your phone bill, since the minitel was using your phone line. No credit card number to enter (and be hacked), no credentials to enter. Of course it also meant kids had access to it…

Web Monetization, Coil.com, Interledger are trying to solve that same problem [1] but honestly It's doubtful it will work.

1 - I've written about this here https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-monetizati... and it was widely, if mostly negatively, discussed on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26375857

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

#95

Post by npunt »

This reminds me of the Nortel Displayphone [1], a similar all-in-one computer with 1200bps modem and keyboard. By the time I got mine from a friend in ~1992 it was already way outclassed by PCs, but I loved the hardware integration and the alt-future it suggested. I used it to log into a few BBSes before getting bored with the slow speed and amber monochrome screen. If I'd been older & had one in the early/mid 80s I'm sure it would have been a big part of my life.

Related, in Santa Monica where I grew up we had one of the first municipally operated BBSes in the world called PEN [2][3] that was primarily accessible from the library and other public terminals. I remember it was pretty fascinating but something that was more for adults so I never really used it much.

One thing I loved about the BBS era (1980s to about ~1995) was that everything was distinctly local, due to long distance charges. It added a layer of meaning and rootedness to online activities thats impossible to recapture now.

[1] http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/disphone/index.htm

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160313225121/https://www.wired...

[3] See page 77: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11860/3290549...

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

#96

Post by thematrixturtle »

lsllc wrote: post #83

The UK had Teletext: https://theconversation.com/teletext-was-slow-but-it-paved-t...

Teletext was popular in much of Europe, but the big difference to Minitel is that it was essentially broadcast only: you could browse pages, but not contribute to them. This obviously vastly limited its utility, since things like reservations and chat services were not possible.

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

#97

Post by agumonkey »

renaudg wrote: post #75
miniwark wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The real thing than Minitel hindred in France are Bulletin Board Systems. They where never really a thing in France. As a Frenchman who spent most of my high school evenings on demoscene-oriented BBSes like A.C.E., Dune and Eden, I'll beg to differ and raise this : http://web.fdn.fr/~musical/bbsf.txt :)

I only heard of BBS twice in my youth, even if I was kind of a nerd, it was really a niche thing, wasn't it ? I wonder how BBS worked in those days.

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

#98

Post by xwolfi »

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 (!!)…

The first thing I did when we got a computer at home with a modem was... to login to the minitel with my computer via an emulator downloaded on the internet, because all the cool stuff was there !! Mostly french video game guides since I was 11 lol

Then, I'd ask the minitel site to send me by fax the doc I wanted to read and it would call me and print on fax via the same emulator lol

The next few months, EVERYTHING moved to the internet and this stopped being necessary, but it was kinda cool... and HORRIBLY expensive vs the internet.

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

#99

Post by xwolfi »

louissan wrote: post #4

I remember being nearly murdered by my parents after they received the phone bill via the (physical, paper-based in those days :-) ) mail. The minitel promptly was locked out of reach of the family's children .... still, good days. They even had games! 36.15 ...

Yeah my switch from minitel to internet was quick when my parents compared the bills lol.

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

#100

Post by xwolfi »

yodsanklai wrote: post #41

I have fond memories of Minitel. I remember chatting with other kids on forums when I was about 10 years old. It was really the web before the web. The only issue was that it was incredibly expensive (except for a few services). But it was revolutionary in the sense that within a couple of years, almost every family had one and became connected. Overall, it was a much faster adoption than internet: it wasn't until th…

I remember chatting with non-kids as a kid ahaha and we'd go with my friends to meetup chats and just bullshit around. The internet exploded this ofc, and I suppose you've been to the Skyrock IRC web frontend in your youth, which was the seediest place for us at the time :D
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