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Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

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Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

#51

Post by digi_owl »

simias wrote: post #22
moviuro wrote: post #11

FWIW, my engineering school's IT team still has Minitels in use in their various server rooms, because it can be used as serial console for a variety of devices (you know, just in case everything is broken and physical presence is required). The Retrocave Man should be able to do the same and enjoy our AZERTY keyboard.

AZERTY really is a terrible layout though, I can't find anything it's good at, not even typing french. You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance. If you're programming you're going to have the alt-gr key pressed half the time but admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric. But hey, you can type 'µ' with a single unmodified keystroke!

> admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric.

More like US layout centric.

EVen the humble unix CLI is a straight pain on anything but a US keyboard, as things like / now require a modifier key.

Funny thing is that There is a variant of the US layout with the right alt being alt-gr, allowing most languages that use latin script to be typed.

Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

#52

Post by digi_owl »

candiodari wrote: post #2

Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the "porn" (mostly text or chat based, so…

The early days of European internet was similarly metered.

Very few nations had anything like the US system of local calls being free.

Only with the advent of DSL etc did flat fee net connections become "common".

Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

#53

Post by hazeii »

Jaruzel wrote: post #33
hazeii wrote: post #6

We were running a multi-user text adventure on Prestel at the time, and BT wanted to put it Minitel (in a lot of ways, Minitel was Prestel done right - at least technically). Cue some days in Paris running around with a 'portable' Panasonic PC that must've weighed 25lbs; 4.77MHz, orange plasma screen and 2 ISA slots, one of which was used to hold the full-length X25 card used to connect to Minitel. I got a lot out of…

Looking at your HN username, I am guessing you are referring to Shades? Hello there, Arch-Wiz! ;) I lost 1000s of hours playing Prestel Shades... endlessly typing 'ret ls' at everyone and everything... ah those were the days. Hmm, I think I still owe my father a ton of money for all those MASSIVE phone bills!

That'd be 'coder' to you, Sir!

Sorry about the bills - I always felt bad about them.

Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

#54

Post by hazeii »

walshemj wrote: post #39
hazeii wrote: post #6

We were running a multi-user text adventure on Prestel at the time, and BT wanted to put it Minitel (in a lot of ways, Minitel was Prestel done right - at least technically). Cue some days in Paris running around with a 'portable' Panasonic PC that must've weighed 25lbs; 4.77MHz, orange plasma screen and 2 ISA slots, one of which was used to hold the full-length X25 card used to connect to Minitel. I got a lot out of…

Ah that would explain the mintel terminal I found at tymnet house at hemel for my odd terminal collection :-) I used to work on billing for TG and latterly Prestel 80:BTG174 (Neuromancer on the NB) and I think I was Mouser on Shades

Your persona is almostly certainly still in there (unless you were naughty enough to get blotted).

The Telecom Gold gateway was way better than the Prestel one; more gome users on the Prestel (Micronet) side though.

What killed both Prestel - and the BT interest in Minitel - was the bad press they were getting for their premium rate business. So BT decided to 'de-emphasise' all the non-core business by treating the paying customers like sh!t; sort of bounced off the Shades players though, so eventually they did have to just shut it all down.

Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

#55

Post by hazeii »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #30

I recently bought a Minitel (v2 I think). Any ideas about what to do with it? I'm thinking something with a Raspberry Pi.

Text search engine? (submit the query to $SEARCH_ENGINE, and display the results - or bonus points for using Gopher).

Shouldn't be hard to do 1200/75 on the Pi audio, even on the stock audio output.

Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

#56

Post by hazeii »

walshemj wrote: post #43
buserror wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work as a system's engineer for the biggest service provider of the minitel era, back in 1989+. MOST of the services were for professionals -- in fact the biggest by far for volume and revenue was a transport exchange for lorries... There were a few 'pink services' (can't call that porn really, it was just chatbots with (sometimes!) real 'hostesses') as mentioned, but they were nowhere near the biggest. The…

Ineresting I never new that BT's other online service Telecom Gold also used Pr1me's I think we where the largest non black user in the UK - I used to have root on all of them and super root on the billing systems.

I thought they were GEC's but might well have been Primes.

I do recall being in Baynard House one night and having a furious shift leader burst in and shout that he wasn't putting up with Shades overloading various mainframes around the country ("what, my little box?" :) ).

Although I never saw much backroom stuff on Minitel, from the outside it was pretty sweet compared to working with BT.

Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

#57

Post by hazeii »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #41
andrelaszlo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome! Do you have more information/documentation?

http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361 Sure, I used this guide. http://millevaches.hydraule.org/info/minitel/specs/ Here is some information on the character codes too.

Just had a look in the library; I seem to have about half a dozen minitel manuals in there. Minitel terminal specs, "Specifications de la fonction decodage Videotex des Minitels" plus X25 stuff like "Specifications Techniques d'Utilisation du Reroutage TELETEL" and "Specifications Techniques d'Utilisation du Point d'Acess Videotex". Any use?

Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

#58

Post by hazeii »

walshemj wrote: post #39
hazeii wrote: post #6

We were running a multi-user text adventure on Prestel at the time, and BT wanted to put it Minitel (in a lot of ways, Minitel was Prestel done right - at least technically). Cue some days in Paris running around with a 'portable' Panasonic PC that must've weighed 25lbs; 4.77MHz, orange plasma screen and 2 ISA slots, one of which was used to hold the full-length X25 card used to connect to Minitel. I got a lot out of…

Ah that would explain the mintel terminal I found at tymnet house at hemel for my odd terminal collection :-) I used to work on billing for TG and latterly Prestel 80:BTG174 (Neuromancer on the NB) and I think I was Mouser on Shades

NB 'mouser' is still in the file; not giving too much away if I say you don't seem to have logged in this millennium :)

Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

#59

Post by walshemj »

hazeii wrote: post #56
walshemj wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ineresting I never new that BT's other online service Telecom Gold also used Pr1me's I think we where the largest non black user in the UK - I used to have root on all of them and super root on the billing systems.

I thought they were GEC's but might well have been Primes. I do recall being in Baynard House one night and having a furious shift leader burst in and shout that he wasn't putting up with Shades overloading various mainframes around the country ("what, my little box?" :) ). Although I never saw much backroom stuff on Minitel, from the outside it was pretty sweet compared to working with BT.

Prestel was GEC's GEC 4082's Telecom Gold Was Pr1mes I think all 750's

I should have really had a trip out to baynard to check it out as I was I suppose the dev-op on the Dialcom side working on the new Billing system.

Re: Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

#60

Post by candiodari »

buserror wrote: post #50
candiodari wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to the thousands of miscellaneous services that were at one point provided ? What I mean to say is that minitel was in an incredible position to grow and be a massive platform, worth 3 digit billions of dollars, and instead traded this potential for charging for every second. This pushed all the random services (granted, mostly chat, and forum like things) that were cool at one point off off it, and fir…

The company I worked for was filthy rich with Minitel. I don't know where you heard there wasn't money in it, but even with Transpac charges it was making a scary bundle for the operators... Of course there might have been an economy of scale in our case, but it was scary. They were bringing Ruinart champagne /by the pallet/ for employees to enjoy. Basically you could throw a party any day (for anything! like "I've j…

Okay, and what happened to that company past, say, 1998-2000 ?
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