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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)

#101

Post by xwolfi »

Cupertino95014 wrote: post #17

The 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.

The internet also was billed by the phone companies at first ! I suppose everywhere was the same but this was not like a surprising thing when we had only one telco company around 2000.

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

#102

Post by xwolfi »

FiddlerClamp wrote: post #68

Traveling through Paris in 1989 I met a guy who had a terminal at his place, and explained to me what a boon it was for gay guys to meet up with each other, socialize, and make friends. I have no doubt that gay men partly drove Minitel adoption (along with other technologies like group phone chat lines, dating apps, and so on).

Yes, we'd go to gay minitel sites as kids to giggle at their personals...

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

#103

Post by 123pie123 »

pengaru wrote: post #84
123pie123 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

jeez my memory is playing up, I must have installed it by default whilst setting all the other crap up.

Like installing Office on 35+ disks

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

#104

Post by hnlmorg »

trasz wrote: post #58
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?

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.

In those days doing things by computer wasn't ubiquitous anyway (due to expense, lack of social/peer pressure, and fewer people were trained to use computers). So it was still common to hand write formal letters so such like.

This meant that even those on older hardware like 8-bit micros with monospaced dot matrix printers were still at an advantage. So people often ran with older hardware for longer.

It wasn't really until a combination of PC gaming taking off (particularly with 3D games that consoles of the same era couldn't compete with) and the WWW that many Europeans started taking IBM-compatible machine upgrades seriously.

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

#105

Post by southerntofu »

glandium wrote: post #91
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…

> 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.

If i remember well, you still had to pay for the phone call to the service, even if the service itself was "free".

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

#106

Post by southerntofu »

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…

Because the phone network can't be hacked, perhaps? Also in my views, that something cannot be monetized is a feature, not a bug: trying to monetize WWW/email is precisely what led to the horrors we know today of mass advertisement and surveillance.

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

#107

Post by southerntofu »

sofixa wrote: post #94
cm2187 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes and Paypal and Flattr and so many others tried the same thing before, it's nothing new and nothing interesting. If you've read the mostly negative comments on your thread, i don't need to explain again why that's a terrible idea :-)

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

#108

Post by southerntofu »

agumonkey wrote: post #65
jacquesm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

all solar powered on an esp32 thingie

ESP32 is way too powerful compared to a Minitel. They had zero processing power and simply drew to the screen whatever was typed/received.

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

#109

Post by southerntofu »

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.

If you're familiar with french language, some people argued that most of the "Internet" we use today is in fact technically, politically and economically closer to the Minitel. I'm of course refering to Benjaming Bayart's "Internet Libre ou Minitel 2.0" conference from 2008 which gave birth to the non-profit ISP federation (FFDN).

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

#110

Post by southerntofu »

doe88 wrote: post #38

At 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)

Was it not all of those things? I mean it certainly took great engineering to build a such network, and at the same time placing all computing/resources in the center ensured its decline, an approach which is typical of french engineering from higher schools bureaucrats.
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