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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

#41

Post by loup-vaillant »

dorfsmay wrote: post #38
wott wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Forget about a small technical blogs with almost no multimedia content (just text and code). They're not the problem. Or maybe they are… One reason my web site is light is because of the scale issue.

Think a mildly popular vlog, or basically any YouTube video you've ever watched. I expect the costs so soar pretty quickly, if one wants to sustain the slightest Reddit Hug.

Thing is, it doesn't have to go through the web. Bittorent for instance handles massive distribution in a way that doesn't DDOS the sender. It doesn't work as well as it could however, because our collective upload is severely limited.

Also, the fact one has to rely on an external provider at all it already a problem.

---

The internet is more centralised than you realise. To take just one example, think about how much Alphabet actively spies on for profit: most web searches, analytics for most popular web sites (found this with NoScript), all the content of Gmail, including when one is not on Gmail (even I send email to Gmail users).

Sure, we can still escape it. But there will come a time where our choice will be much simpler: either we use some big provider that will spy the hell out of us, or we stay out of the network altogether, effectively ceasing to participate in society at all.

I have a Facebook story. I first subscribed under pressure from my peers from my music club (ostensibly because it's more convenient). I got flooded by notifications I did not want. I cut the notifications, but still didn't get into the habit of checking out Facebook every day. Then I started missing things that were talked on Facebook (decisions, invitations…). And then I got told "you didn't know? But I sent the email…" (he didn't).

I have since shut down that account, and vowed never to use Facebook ever again. Next time a group forces me to use Facebook, I'll consider not being part of this group.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#42

Post by jacquesm »

fermigier wrote: post #20
astrobe_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

That's more than most programmers.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#43

Post by freehunter »

kyberias wrote: post #12
freehunter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People like the guy I responded to think that because they have an axe to grind against Apple. Notice how he said "Apple's app ecosystem" and not "Android app ecosystem", when Google's platform is just as robust? And didn't Microsoft start it with ActiveX and IE? Or how about "Works best with Netscape Navigator"?

But no, it's Apple's fault. Everything is Apple's fault.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#45

Post by dolmen »

fnj wrote: post #22

The real minitel was a public domain modem comms program for MS-DOS/PC-DOS created by the brilliant Tom Jennings in 1983 (the FidoNet guy).

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel :

The service was rolled out experimentally in 1978 in Brittany and throughout France in 1982

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#46

Post by bigbugbag »

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…

The minitel was centralized technically as in dumb terminals connecting to a smart server[1]. Everyone wanting to connect to your own hosted full service would have to connect to a central point: your own hosted full service. But there was one service, 3618 or service MIAMI, that allowed direct connection minitel to minitel but this was using a different network and stayed available 2 years after the minitel network was shut down.

The economic model was definitely not what you said, there was a wide range of possibilities: fully free (3623), free with a time limitation (3611), paid for by the service provider (3613), paid for by the user with no money for the service provider (3614), paid by the word (3656 to send a telegram), paid by the user with money split with the service provider a.k.a. kiosk debuting in 1984 (3615), overcharged services (3617, 3628, 3629). Some had a fixed costs at connection.

Ads were a thing minitel services, from a simple banner to a full page interstitial graphics that you had to wait a little while for it to load. Tracking also though much less elaborated and certainly not exploited the way it is today.

Minitel was not given to all for free, it was offered for a limited time to people in exchange for opting out of receiving the free local white pages phone book, this economic model of giving away the terminal and recouping the costs through services prices was much criticized but has now become common (printer, smartphones, ...). Then you could either rent or buy a minitel, usually a more evolved version.

The use of the minitel was mostly the phone directory, buying train tickets and erotic messaging. The kiosk where the service provider get its share of the money made the minitel successful. Among services were 3615 internet to connect to the internet with your minitel which paid for altern.org and ultimately lead to gandi.fr, also notable is Xavier Niels who debuted his career to becoming the billionaire behind free.fr and proxad.net as a high schooler with a minitel erotic messaging service.

To get deeper see this INA article[2].

[1]: This is the basis of the famous talk "internet or minitel 2.0" from 10 years ago about the evolution of internet https://www.fdn.fr/actions/confs/internet-libre-ou-minitel-2...

[2]: http://www.inaglobal.fr/telecoms/article/du-minitel-linterne

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#47

Post by bigbugbag »

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.

You got it wrong. To get a minitel without paying for it you had to opt out of receiving the local white pages phone book. Minitel costs was marginally recouped by saving on printing and recycling phone books and mostly by paid services.

The white pages phone book was still around last year.

Also with 6.5 millions minitel owners at peak in 1993 we were far from every household having one.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#48

Post by bigbugbag »

dorfsmay wrote: post #39
wott wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You ll find more about the minitel history here: http://www.inaglobal.fr/telecoms/article/du-minitel-linterne

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#49

Post by bigbugbag »

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.

Both actually, France Telecom (now Orange) was not ready for broadband, their infrastructure needed an overhaul. At the same time they had the minitel where they were the middle man with a 45% share of everything for them, and almost all internet was through PSTN which made them money too. All in all: a multi billions incentive not to develop broadband internet.

At the time Orange mostly worked to block competitors while overcharging their own services. Ultimately they got sued, lost after years and paid a record fine amounting to a fraction of their profits.

So they continued engaging in this practice to this day with now quite a record of record fines for abuse of dominant position and such. Recently there was a year they made an unexpected bump in yearly profit because they had secured money to pay the next big fine which didn't happen.

Right now Orange is in the process of securing a monopoly on french fiber on public funds.

Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

#50

Post by bigbugbag »

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.

Are you talking about local-loop unbundling ?
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