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Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

theatlantic.com

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Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#31

Post by wott »

dorfsmay wrote: post #28
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…

> every household got a Minitel for free People got minitels (available for free) because phone books were eliminated, so even people not interested by the online world (shopping, train/flight reservations, dating "sites", high school diploma results, weather forecast, etc...), would get one in order to be able to look up phone numbers.

Phone books were not eliminated. Minitel gave you access to the phone numbers in the whole country, whereas phone books were limited to your department (for foreigners: France is divided in about 100 departments).

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#32

Post by wott »

dorfsmay wrote: post #27
loup-vaillant wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Internet was a decentralized That's the key word: was . Now that the web has mostly eaten the internet, the network has been centred around a few nodes. And we still have the asymmetric bandwidth that is the primary driver of centralisation. Make no mistake, the internet has become just a centralised and consumer-oriented than the minitel was. Even I don't host my own web site, for 2 reasons: HTTP doesn't scale, an…

If your website is small enough, not getting many visits, does it need to scale? CDNs are becoming a cheap commodity.

> CDNs are becoming a cheap commodity.

And then all sites are centralised again at Cloudflare and a handful of others.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#33

Post by wott »

cm2187 wrote: post #25
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…

The France Telecom monopoly on telephone line probably did more to slow down broadband adoption that the minitel.

I don't think so. There was a huge raise in prices when the market opened.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#34

Post by bsaul »

Funny anecdote : the founder of "free" internet provider, xavier niel, made his first bucks running a minitel service ( an erotic service iirc, what people called "minitel rose"), then later completely disrupted french internet dsl access by offering unlimited high speed access for a few bucks a month. I worked at france telecom at the time ( the old monopolistic company that owned all the coper lines), and i remember employees not believing this offer to be real.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#35

Post by cm2187 »

wott wrote: post #33
cm2187 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The France Telecom monopoly on telephone line probably did more to slow down broadband adoption that the minitel.

I don't think so. There was a huge raise in prices when the market opened.

I don't remember that. I mostly remember that I could finally use by 8Mbit modem at 8Mbit instead of the 1Mbit or 500kbit (can't remember which) to which France Telecom was artificially capping it.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#37

Post by BrandoElFollito »

wott wrote: post #31
dorfsmay wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every household got a Minitel for free People got minitels (available for free) because phone books were eliminated, so even people not interested by the online world (shopping, train/flight reservations, dating "sites", high school diploma results, weather forecast, etc...), would get one in order to be able to look up phone numbers.

Phone books were not eliminated. Minitel gave you access to the phone numbers in the whole country, whereas phone books were limited to your department (for foreigners: France is divided in about 100 departments).

Phonebooks ARE not eliminated. I got one last year (it was a pile outside and one could grab one).

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#38

Post by dorfsmay »

wott wrote: post #32
dorfsmay wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your website is small enough, not getting many visits, does it need to scale? CDNs are becoming a cheap commodity.

> CDNs are becoming a cheap commodity. And then all sites are centralised again at Cloudflare and a handful of others.

There are more and more cheap CDNs out there, not just Cloudflare! A lot of them will cost you the price of a VPN or the cost of the electricity to run your own server.

Most CDNs, and especially the newer ones can work with things like the Cache-Control header, which means that for a basic small site you don't even need to get into their console or know much about how one particular CDN, and ti means that switching to a different one is as simple as a one DNS record change, hence my saying that they have become a commodity, completely the opposite of your assertion that "all site are centralised".

Note that I do think that the internet is becoming more centralised, but in my opinion the issue is long term maintenance. Small site run by a single person will disappear when that person stops maintaining it, or dies... I have no solution to this issue, but it is one of the reason I give to archive.org.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#39

Post by dorfsmay »

wott wrote: post #31
dorfsmay wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every household got a Minitel for free People got minitels (available for free) because phone books were eliminated, so even people not interested by the online world (shopping, train/flight reservations, dating "sites", high school diploma results, weather forecast, etc...), would get one in order to be able to look up phone numbers.

Phone books were not eliminated. Minitel gave you access to the phone numbers in the whole country, whereas phone books were limited to your department (for foreigners: France is divided in about 100 departments).

Seems correct - weird, I was sure this was the case... They are eliminating the white pages only now:

https://www.nextinpact.com/news/98960-les-annuaires-pagesbla...

So it was only hosehold with a minitel that stopped receiving white pages:

"les foyers équipés de Minitel ne recevaient plus que les pages jaunes" (Homes with Minitel received the yellow pages only)

http://obligement.free.fr/articles/histoire_minitel.php

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#40

Post by flodor »

Minitel was also used a lot for chatrooms (most of them for sexual purposes). Of course most of the women in those chatrooms where men working for the service. A few guys has made a lot of money with it (the creator from "Free" french internet provider). It is extremly funny because on the picture you can see a list of nicknames, it looks like some bdsm chatroom :)
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