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France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

nytimes.com

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Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#21

Post by randallsquared »

LaGrange wrote: post #17
mikecane wrote: post #7

Everyone hailed Minitel in the 1980s. It was touted as an example of what gov't should do (these were also the days of Japan, Inc. kicking everyone's ass, also showing what gov't "should" do for industry). Yet along came the Black Swan of the Internet to slay it. Central planning never works.

Except the cases where central planning works, like (DUH!) Minitel (until the internet came, it didn't fail, it just got upgraded, duh), going to the Moon (distributed attempt at reaching the moon, also known as the living pyramid), justice system (as soon as you introduce the ability for appeal), the Internet, DNS system (it may be not centralized, but it is centrally planned), Google, Apple, and your own consciousn…

[...] and your own consciousness.

I can't tell if the "central planning" you refer to with respect to consciousness is supposed to be a homunculus or an intelligent designer, but either way I disagree.

Brains are pretty well distributed, and various degrees and kinds of brain damage have shown that no specific location is an inherently privileged "command center" of the brain; [different] people have continued to be thinking people without each part of it.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#22

Post by Klinky »

nodata wrote: post #16
Klinky wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central planning never works. But the Internet was the spin-off of a centrally planned government network. I am not sure it's accurate to say the failure of "competing" services was due to the failures of central planning, but more related to the onward march of technology(cheaper & faster). Even now the Internet is far from decentralized & some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary.

The Internet became the success it is now once it escaped from being a centrally planned government network.

I know! Agencies like ARPANET, NSFNet & CERN were real drains on the Internet. All they provided was huge initial monetary outlays for building the initial backbones & tech like TCP/IP & HTTP. It also appears that the government made the choice to open the network up for commerce. So I guess these centralized agencies setting up the initial infrastructure & later opening it up when personal computers were becoming affordable was a failure?

Concepts like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server... Yes all very decentralized concepts..mmm hmmm.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#23

Post by Klinky »

mikecane wrote: post #13
Klinky wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central planning never works. But the Internet was the spin-off of a centrally planned government network. I am not sure it's accurate to say the failure of "competing" services was due to the failures of central planning, but more related to the onward march of technology(cheaper & faster). Even now the Internet is far from decentralized & some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary.

>>>some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary. Which all tend to eventually fail. The Source, CompuServe, Delphi, AOL, all failed.

Firstly, suggesting dial-up ISPs failed because they had a centralized business structure makes no sense. That's like saying horse & buggy manufacturers went out of business due to their centralized business structure rather than the introduction of the car. Also for the record AOL is still around & those companies were successful for their time.

Second, I was speaking about things like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server architecture as being non-decentralized. Additionally some of the biggest services on the Internet are indeed centralized. Google, Facebook, iTunes. ISP options have also been drastically reduced over the last two decades.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#24

Post by ignifero »

snippyhollow wrote: post #14
jgrahamc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'est ou ça à Toulouse? J'habitais à Toulouse (l'hyper-centre) pendant trois ans.

Je pense que c'est ici http://www.mixart-myrys.org // http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Mixart-Myrys+toulouse&hl=f... :)

See, if you guys had made an english version, it would be a household name by now.

downvote.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#25

Post by madflo »

kahawe wrote: post #19
alx wrote: post #4

I'm from Tetalab, a hackerspace in Toulouse, France, and we still use the minitel for some hacks with arduino: http://www.tetalab.org/images/tetalab/MSM.jpg It's a neat interface, everybody here in France remember it from the 80's, and it quite easy to hack it. We should soon release an arduino lib for eveybody to hack it, but it'll be quite hard to find a minitel if you're not in France (nobody use it anymore, it's…

How difficult would it be to make a proxy for it and make minitel accessible world wide? Do they bill you per minute?

Yes, they do. There are several billing schemes. Usually a connexion fee plus a per minute billing.

The fun part being that there was e-mail and www services accessible from the Minitel.

France Telecom internet provider, Wanadoo (now Orange) used to provide an ActiveX application to access the Minitel over IP; with the per minute usage being billed on the Internet account owner tab.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#26

Post by [deleted] »

kahawe wrote: post #19
alx wrote: post #4

I'm from Tetalab, a hackerspace in Toulouse, France, and we still use the minitel for some hacks with arduino: http://www.tetalab.org/images/tetalab/MSM.jpg It's a neat interface, everybody here in France remember it from the 80's, and it quite easy to hack it. We should soon release an arduino lib for eveybody to hack it, but it'll be quite hard to find a minitel if you're not in France (nobody use it anymore, it's…

How difficult would it be to make a proxy for it and make minitel accessible world wide? Do they bill you per minute?

[deleted]

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#27

Post by nodata »

Klinky wrote: post #22
nodata wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet became the success it is now once it escaped from being a centrally planned government network.

I know! Agencies like ARPANET, NSFNet & CERN were real drains on the Internet. All they provided was huge initial monetary outlays for building the initial backbones & tech like TCP/IP & HTTP. It also appears that the government made the choice to open the network up for commerce. So I guess these centralized agencies setting up the initial infrastructure & later opening it up when personal computers were becoming af…

What? Just because a lot of the stuff started off as government research projects doesn't mean they centrally planned the migration from what it was to what it is now.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#28

Post by madflo »

jgrahamc wrote: post #11
galactus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't "the internet" created by the gouvernment too?

The early days of Internet were funded by the US government but not in the same way as Minitel. The French government massively subsidized the deployment of Minitel by giving away millions of terminals (in exchange for not giving the subscriber the white pages on paper) and that helped launch it. But if you ignore the arguments about who funded what there are lots of aspects of Minitel that are interesting because it…

I may add that that after all, all the money granted for the Minitel program by the gouvernement has been recovered with taxes on Minitel minutes.

I would consider the Minitel as a success of central planning. 20 years of e-economy and quite a lot of money moving from French citizen to French corporations or smaller businesses.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#29

Post by LaGrange »

randallsquared wrote: post #21
LaGrange wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the cases where central planning works, like (DUH!) Minitel (until the internet came, it didn't fail, it just got upgraded, duh), going to the Moon (distributed attempt at reaching the moon, also known as the living pyramid), justice system (as soon as you introduce the ability for appeal), the Internet, DNS system (it may be not centralized, but it is centrally planned), Google, Apple, and your own consciousn…

[...] and your own consciousness. I can't tell if the "central planning" you refer to with respect to consciousness is supposed to be a homunculus or an intelligent designer, but either way I disagree. Brains are pretty well distributed, and various degrees and kinds of brain damage have shown that no specific location is an inherently privileged "command center" of the brain; [different] people have continued to be…

I agree, I actually meant "central planning" as in "your behavior is centrally planned by your brain". "Consciousness" was a pretty awkwardly chosen word, obviously.

Re: France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B

#30

Post by masklinn »

The Minitel was so entrenched long into the 90s it quite significantly hampered the original deployment of the 'net in France:

* No need to register anywhere to use it (your identity was connected to your landline)

* No maintenance or security issues

* No compatibility issues (everything was pretty low-tech, but following strict standards)

On the other hand, it had online payments, payments to sites (the national access provider charged based on access time depending on the service you connected to, and part of the money was funnelled to the service provider) and social media-based civil resistance (french university students coordinated strikes using Minitel as early as 1986). As a result the french population was not really taken aback by those capabilities in the interwebs, they were kinda used to them.

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