I remember ads in Video Game magazine claiming you could get free video games. You would actually pay by dialing 1 Hour or so on a very expensive service.
Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
61–70 of 127 posts
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> many services that could be used by non-technical people and had a built in monetization system for information providers There's still a Minitel today: it's the Apple ecosystem. Minitel demonstrated regular people were willing to buy services on a machine (phone, phone-like terminal, computer) and use it as part of their normal lives.
Why singleout apple, when our lives are surrounded by digital subscriptions from a lot of other companies too? Office, Netflix, Youtube Premium, Spotify, Blackblaze etc, etc...
Because the Minitel was completely vertivally integrated.
The terminals, software it ran (as the "OS"), Network and billing were all handled by one entity. And only this entity could approve software for distribution. It was a completely centralized walled garden.
Office, Netflix, Youtube Premium, Spotify, Blackblaze can all run anywhere, and on platforms such as Windows are free to do their own distribution.
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still think it's better for the average people. It's also frugal oriented. You won't have youtube or google maps but for simple searches or orders I think it was peak. Just give it a speed bump and you're good.
Zero eye candy, and 1KB pages. Imagine how fast those would load on today's hardware.
8 colors is plenty eye candy :)
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#64In Germany we had something similar called BTX that included online banking in 1981: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/28/business/high-technology-...
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still think it's better for the average people. It's also frugal oriented. You won't have youtube or google maps but for simple searches or orders I think it was peak. Just give it a speed bump and you're good.
Zero eye candy, and 1KB pages. Imagine how fast those would load on today's hardware.
all solar powered on an esp32 thingie
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. I worked for France Télécom's Wanadoo ISP division and the Minitel guys tried to sabotage us at every opportunity, including getting the head of our first division CEO Roger Courtois, but they did not manage to slow the progress, even though at the time they had $1B/year in revenues. The bigger hindrance was relatively low PC penetration compared to the UK, Netherlands or Germany. Fun story: at the time T…
> The bigger hindrance was relatively low PC penetration compared to the UK, Netherlands or Germany. Wasn't that, in part, due to the fact that many people in France already had a Minitel at home?
It's only partly true,
many people indeed have a Minitel at home, because it was free to have one (like it was free to have a landline phone). You only had to pay for the usage. And there was great services not yet available on WWW : find the train timetable, find the phone number of someone, chat with a (fake) sexy girl...
As for the PC penetration, there was many, but most of them where not ready for network usage : Commodore, Amstrad, Amiga, Thomson and first generation IBM-PC with MS-DOS. Only the last Amiga, Macintosh and IBM compatibles had the software to use a modem (Thomson had included a Minitel as dual bot in some of their computer instead).
There was no need for internet or to change the computer when WordPerfect, Multiplan and games still work perfectly. At the time, the pricey computer than you bought in the 80's was still good enough in the 90's...
I think than what had incite people to get a computer with modem is not WWW but email (with was not a Minitel feature). The real thing than Minitel hindred in France are Bulletin Board Systems. They where never really a thing in France.
For the curious, there are still a few unofficial Minitel services available : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-serveur_Minitel All you need is a Raspberry Pi and a modified Minitel...
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#67Is there a place in France, probably a technical museum, where one can still try functional Minitel terminal? Or maybe an online "demo"?
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#68Traveling through Paris in 1989 I met a guy who had a terminal at his place, and explained to me what a boon it was for gay guys to meet up with each other, socialize, and make friends. I have no doubt that gay men partly drove Minitel adoption (along with other technologies like group phone chat lines, dating apps, and so on).
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#69In Italy, the same service was called Videotel[0] and the terminals were sold by the state-owned phone company, Sip. there was a model where the keyboard would slide out from under the CRT screen[1], and another model where the hinged keyboard would fold onto the screen (similar to a laptop keyboard, except in this case it's the keyboard that folds up, not the screen that folds down)[2].
I remember in my area some pubs had these, they were on the tables and you could use them while you were there, it was the first time in my life that I was chatting with someone on the other side of the globe. (I had tried visiting some of the popular BBS on my Amiga to look at cool stuff but had never actually exchanged messages with anyone online). It was cool because you could talk to perfect strangers but sometimes the discussion would go deep. I remember I was so excited about it and my friends were too. I think in the modern Internet we don't really have something like that.
[0] (Italian Wikipedia) - https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotel
[1] (picture) https://forum.telefonino.net/images_fotodb/pict001494862_7_1...
[2] (picture) https://i.ebayimg.com/00/z/3UcAAOSwT5RdB2AU/$_59.JPG
Re: Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
#70I currently work for the person who helped start US Videotel and I still haven't scratched much of the surface about all of it with him. Everything about Minitel and US Videotel reminds me of what was depicted in seasons 2 and 3 of Halt and Catch Fire . I always wondered if Minitel was their inspiration for the Mutiny software.
To me Mutiny looks like Lucasfilm Habitat down to the UI and C64 platform. https://twitter.com/wwwploguecom/status/628896016381685760 http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html