Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#11

Post by glandium »

fabrice_d wrote: post #9
mojuba wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they already had What they didn't see though was that Internet was a decentralized, truly democratic network unlike Minitel and the likes (e.g. CompuServe, AOL, Bitnet I think?). For its time Minitel was quite good aesthetically and in terms of UI, but as a centralized consumer-oriented network it had no chance to compete with the Internet.

It was not totally centralized technically. You could host your own full service, using your own modem banks and servers. The drawback was that you would not be discoverable in the minitel directory and you would not get the billing system etc. People needed to know your phone number and dial it to connect. Minitel took a long time to die because it was a cash cow, both for France Telecom and service providers. The e…

When I was in middle school, I was participating in a meteorological club, and we had such a minitel server.

People from around could phone in with their minitel, and get the information we'd put there for them. The few kids in the club collected data from a small weather station, compiled it, and put it there. We'd also sometimes redesign the presentation of the minitel "site".

We were coached by a maths teacher, and that was part of what got me into computers (I had an Oric Atmos at home, the club was the first time I had access to PCs (with Windows 2! But we'd most usually run DOS); we had access to some Thomson MO5 in primary school before that).

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#12

Post by kyberias »

freehunter wrote: post #8
johnflan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, the Apple app eco system comes to mind.

Apple's apps have nothing to do with an open or closed Internet.

But people seem to think that and they have a reason. When apps replace web content, they quite clearly have something to do with the Internet. Web is part of the Internet. Isn't this obvious?

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#13

Post by astrobe_ »

glandium wrote: post #11
fabrice_d wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not totally centralized technically. You could host your own full service, using your own modem banks and servers. The drawback was that you would not be discoverable in the minitel directory and you would not get the billing system etc. People needed to know your phone number and dial it to connect. Minitel took a long time to die because it was a cash cow, both for France Telecom and service providers. The e…

When I was in middle school, I was participating in a meteorological club, and we had such a minitel server. People from around could phone in with their minitel, and get the information we'd put there for them. The few kids in the club collected data from a small weather station, compiled it, and put it there. We'd also sometimes redesign the presentation of the minitel "site". We were coached by a maths teacher, an…

IIRC some variants of the Minitel had a RS232 port. I've seen it used to program alarm systems on site.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#14

Post by fabrice_d »

astrobe_ wrote: post #13
glandium wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in middle school, I was participating in a meteorological club, and we had such a minitel server. People from around could phone in with their minitel, and get the information we'd put there for them. The few kids in the club collected data from a small weather station, compiled it, and put it there. We'd also sometimes redesign the presentation of the minitel "site". We were coached by a maths teacher, an…

IIRC some variants of the Minitel had a RS232 port. I've seen it used to program alarm systems on site.

Even the Minitel 1 had a rs232 port, on a non standard connector. Super slow though, 75/1200 bauds :)

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#15

Post by glandium »

astrobe_ wrote: post #13
glandium wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in middle school, I was participating in a meteorological club, and we had such a minitel server. People from around could phone in with their minitel, and get the information we'd put there for them. The few kids in the club collected data from a small weather station, compiled it, and put it there. We'd also sometimes redesign the presentation of the minitel "site". We were coached by a maths teacher, an…

IIRC some variants of the Minitel had a RS232 port. I've seen it used to program alarm systems on site.

IIRC, all the minitels above and including the 1B had a serial port, but it was through a DIN connector. We were using that to test our "site" by feeding it directly from a PC.

I'm not sure the Minitel 1 had one.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#16

Post by omginternets »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

Minitel had one huge drawback: it was too good. It put France a solid 4 years behind the rest of the world when the web hit. Everything in France was done via Minitel, and in the beginning the web was still so small and capable of much less that the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they already had. But that changed rapidly and before long the head start turned into a lag and a ton of ine…

>Even so it took until 2012(!) before Minitel was finally decommissioned.

As a point of interest, there are still buildings that use (local) minitel systems to manage security, elevators, electricity, etc. It's not uncommon to see contractors with a minitel terminal in the back of the truck.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#17

Post by okket »

Xoros wrote: post #10

As stated by Jacquesm, Minitel slowed down Internet deployment in France. Every bank, mail ordering sellers or alike already had their Minitel "site" (in which they invested money) so jumping in the new train took time. At the end of the 90's, I had to develop a Minitel Emulator for a French bank who wanted to put PC based kiosks where people could have many informations (static coded texts) but also connect to their…

Just for the record: We had a similar experience with banks in Germany, it was called "Bildschirmtext" or "BTX". It took a long time and a lot of emulators until they finally adopted the Internet. Besides this, BTX was not as omnipresent as Minitel was in France.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#20

Post by fermigier »

astrobe_ wrote: post #13
glandium wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in middle school, I was participating in a meteorological club, and we had such a minitel server. People from around could phone in with their minitel, and get the information we'd put there for them. The few kids in the club collected data from a small weather station, compiled it, and put it there. We'd also sometimes redesign the presentation of the minitel "site". We were coached by a maths teacher, an…

IIRC some variants of the Minitel had a RS232 port. I've seen it used to program alarm systems on site.

30 year ago, I hooked my mother's Minitel to my Atari 800 XL's joystick port, using (IIRC) a couple of transistors on a breadboard, and a software serial interface that probably consisted of a few tens of lines of assembly.

This was the summit of my hardware career ;)

Post reply on HN