Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
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Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
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Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
#2Minitel 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 inertia. The world had nothing to compare the web with so that's what it moved to at an incredible clip. Roughly around 1996/1997 France saw the light and then they moved quite rapidly.
Even so it took until 2012(!) before Minitel was finally decommissioned.
Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
#3[deleted]
Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
#4In other words, a nation state sponsored AOL in France. Facebook is headed to the same cemetery.
Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
#5Minitel 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 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.
Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
#6Surprisingly, the Internet is becoming centralized like the Minitel was.
Is history repeating itself?
Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
#7Surprisingly, the Internet is becoming centralized like the Minitel was. Is history repeating itself?
Specifically, the Apple app eco system comes to mind.
Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
#8Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
#9Minitel 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 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 economic model was very simple: users pay the time spent online, and the revenue is shared between the telco and the service provider. No ads, no tracking ;)
It was also successful because every household got a Minitel for free in the mid-80's, when personal computers were very uncommon. And if you had a computer, you could use the Minitel as an external model with a serial port adapter and reach BBSes! Because of that I once had to explain to my parents why I was spending hours calling a number in Germany, which was not a cheap thing :P
Re: Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet
#10As stated by Jacquesm, Minitel slowed down Internet deployment in France. Every bank, mail ordering sellers or alike already had their Minitel "site" (in which they invested money) so jumping in the new train took time.
At the end of the 90's, I had to develop a Minitel Emulator for a French bank who wanted to put PC based kiosks where people could have many informations (static coded texts) but also connect to their accounts. Not a web kiosk (we were specialized in that at the time). A minitel one.