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

I have fond memories of Minitel. I remember chatting with other kids on forums when I was about 10 years old. It was really the web before the web. The only issue was that it was incredibly expensive (except for a few services). But it was revolutionary in the sense that within a couple of years, almost every family had one and became connected.

Overall, it was a much faster adoption than internet: it wasn't until the smartphone that everybody was online, before that lots of families didn't have the mean or the skills to operate a computer. Not mentioning that Windows was such a mess. My father bought a PC which became so slow that he couldn't even use it anymore.

For context for "36.15": you would access Minitel services by typing a numeric code followed by a short textual name, the most common code being 3615.

Advertisements for Minitel services would say something like "Dial 3615 HOTSTUFF to meet a passionate lover". A lot of these services were adult chat, games, or extremely low-res porn, and it was easy to rack up a massive phone bill by connecting to them (you'd have to remember to disconnect, too!). Another very common use cases was phone book lookups.

Think of it as a physical terminal for a ncurses-style terminal app using a remote client, with the display updating line by line with a scanning cursor as you received data. There's an example of what that looked like in this short documentary about Minitel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlUmxUB9RhI&t=500s – every single page loaded line by line that way.

Remember, at the time the Telco was a government department in a country that firmly believes in industrial policy.

De Gaulle had neglected the country's phone network and it was in a piteous state by the 1960s. A popular comedy sketch, "Le 22 à Asnières" by Fernand Raynaud had the hapless protagonist trying to call number 22 at Asnières and it was such an ordeal he only managed to get connected by a telephone operator in New York...

During the 70s, specially under the technocratic president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the French government invested massively to catch up and for several years the Directorate-General of Telecommunications was the single largest government department by budget. They bet massively on digital switching and created huge telco gear vendors in Alcatel. Towards the end of the 70s that massive surge of investment had started to dwindle and the government was trying to figure out what could be the next wave to foster the telecommunications equipment industry, and Minitel was the answer.

It didn't export well. There was a trial in the US with US West, but it didn't pan out. My former boss Jean Lebrun was one of the key people on the electronic phone directory project, and at the time it was the largest real-time database in the world. It was essentially a distributed in-memory database build on 1980s computer technology, and as you can imagine very expensive. Fun story: Oracle tried to get them to evaluate their RDBMS for the project, and even gave them access to the source code, but it was found to be inadequate.

This has always been a great business idea. Watch good foreign films and spin them into Americanized versions then pitch them to Hollywood.

Also I find it amusing that Home Alone in France is titled "Mom, I missed the plane"

At least, René Manzor was eventually hired by Amblin.