8 ms·

Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet

86 points by ForHackernews 9y ago

jacquesm 9y ago
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 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.
- mojuba 9y ago
  > 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.
  - fabrice_d 9y ago
    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
    - glandium 9y ago
      When I was in middle school, I was participating in a meteorological club, and we had such a minitel server. People from around could phone in with their minitel, and get the information we'd put there for them. The few kids in the club collected data from a small weather station, compiled it, and put it there. We'd also sometimes redesign the presentation of the minitel "site". We were coached by a maths teacher, and that was part of what got me into computers (I had an Oric Atmos at home, the club was the first time I had access to PCs (with Windows 2! But we'd most usually run DOS); we had access to some Thomson MO5 in primary school before that).
      - astrobe_ 9y ago
        IIRC some variants of the Minitel had a RS232 port. I've seen it used to program alarm systems on site.
        fabrice_d 9y ago
        Even the Minitel 1 had a rs232 port, on a non standard connector. Super slow though, 75/1200 bauds :)
        glandium 9y ago
        IIRC, all the minitels above and including the 1B had a serial port, but it was through a DIN connector. We were using that to test our "site" by feeding it directly from a PC. I'm not sure the Minitel 1 had one.
        fermigier 9y ago
        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 ;)
        jacquesm 9y ago
        That's more than most programmers.
  - loup-vaillant 9y ago
    > Internet was a decentralized That's the key word: was. Now that the web has mostly eaten the internet, the network has been centred around a few nodes. And we still have the asymmetric bandwidth that is the primary driver of centralisation. Make no mistake, the internet has become just a centralised and consumer-oriented than the minitel was. Even I don't host my own web site, for 2 reasons: HTTP doesn't scale, and I don't have enough upload.
    - dorfsmay 9y ago
      If your website is small enough, not getting many visits, does it need to scale? CDNs are becoming a cheap commodity.
      - wott 9y ago
        > CDNs are becoming a cheap commodity. And then all sites are centralised again at Cloudflare and a handful of others.
        dorfsmay 9y ago
        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 to a different one is as simple as a one DNS record change, hence my saying that they have become a commodity, completely the opposite of your assertion that "all site are centralised". Note that I do think that the internet is becoming more centralised, but in my opinion the issue is long term maintenance. Small site run by a single person will disappear when that person stops maintaining it, or dies... I have no solution to this issue, but it is one of the reason I give to archive.org. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...
        9y ago
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    There was a minitel service "3615 internet" that offered internet access to minitel users, the guy behind this service valentin lacambre used the money to finance altern.org. Here's an interesting snippet of history from "une contre-histoire des internets": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2hA3Bvm1n4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2hA3Bvm1n4
- omginternets 9y ago
  >Even so it took until 2012(!) before Minitel was finally decommissioned. As a point of interest, there are still buildings that use (local) minitel systems to manage security, elevators, electricity, etc. It's not uncommon to see contractors with a minitel terminal in the back of the truck.
- cm2187 9y ago
  The France Telecom monopoly on telephone line probably did more to slow down broadband adoption that the minitel.
  - wott 9y ago
    I don't think so. There was a huge raise in prices when the market opened.
    - cm2187 9y ago
      I don't remember that. I mostly remember that I could finally use by 8Mbit modem at 8Mbit instead of the 1Mbit or 500kbit (can't remember which) to which France Telecom was artificially capping it.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      Are you talking about local-loop unbundling ?
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    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.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  This seems similar to the situation the US is in with broadband and mobile. We already had this big decades-long investment in copper (cable and phone) and old cell towers, so it was easier to just keep using, maintaining, and expanding it while the rest of the world got (or is getting) affordable high cap (or no cap) 4G and fiber to the home. Comcast is in the middle of rolling out gigabit everywhere after Google lit a fire under their butts, so I guess we'll catch up with the rest of the world eventually in our own stumbling, expensive way.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yclopediaen 9y ago
In other words, a nation state sponsored AOL in France. Facebook is headed to the same cemetery.
arnaudsm 9y ago
Surprisingly, the Internet is becoming centralized like the Minitel was. Is history repeating itself?
- johnflan 9y ago
  Specifically, the Apple app eco system comes to mind.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Apple's apps have nothing to do with an open or closed Internet.
    - kyberias 9y ago
      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?
      - freehunter 9y ago
        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.
        bigbugbag 9y ago
        Maybe I'm wrong but my interpretation was quite different. To me he's just pointing out a fact, to me along the 20+ years since I've been aware of the issue many things happened or didn't happen but a few specific things come out of the pack, including the one he cited. To me you came out as the apple fanboy who cannot stand that apple is part of the issue and that it is undeniably apple who popularized the "app store" model, emblematic of the problem at hands. It's only after apple's success that the others followed suit and copied the model to recreate their own distinct impossible to interconnect ecosystem. Even Mozilla has one now. Yes Apple is among the GAFAM who are to blame among many others for the current state of things, but ultimately the failure is in us who chose voluntary submission to new masters, who failed to use our technical knowledge to provide to other less technically inclined, who failed to force ISP to offer the means to self host, and so on I guess this is quite an illustration of "don't argue with fools, from a distance people may not be able to tell the difference".
Xoros 9y ago
As 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.
- okket 9y ago
  Just for the record: We had a similar experience with banks in Germany, it was called "Bildschirmtext" or "BTX". It took a long time and a lot of emulators until they finally adopted the Internet. Besides this, BTX was not as omnipresent as Minitel was in France.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    "Bildschirmtext" (BTX) is almost as old as Minitel and technically very similar, but it was largely unsuccessful because consumers had to buy expensive decoders to use it. The German postal service held a monopoly on the decoders that prevented competition and lower prices. Few people bought the boxes, so there was little incentive for companies to post content, which in turn did nothing to further box sales. When the monopoly was loosened, it was too late because PC-based online services had started to appear. http://www.liquisearch.com/minitel/minitel_in_other_countries http://www.liquisearch.com/minitel/minitel_in_other_countrie...
evaneykelen 9y ago
I've always wondered how much Tim Berners-Lee was inspired by Minitel given the fact that he must have frequently seen or even used them in the area around CERN.
- rjsw 9y ago
  The UK had Prestel [1], it wasn't nearly as widely used as Minitel though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel
evaneykelen 9y ago
I've always wondered how much Tim Berners-Lee was inspired by Minitel given the fact that he must have frequently seen or even used them in the area around CERN.
codecamper 9y ago
I never got to use a Minitel. :( Don't forget Plato. That was my first experience with a networked computer. In about 1985 in Escanaba Michigan no less. I remember chatting with someone on the Dungeons and dragons type Wizardry game & learning they were in California. Whoa! ( I was about 10 or 11 ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQV9sj4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQV9sj4I
fnj 9y ago
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).
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  You might even say he invented minitel
- dolmen 9y ago
  From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel : The service was rolled out experimentally in 1978 in Brittany and throughout France in 1982
cm2187 9y ago
Interestingly, the minitel solved the monetization problem as visitors would automatically be billed by the phone company at the rate chosen by the service they visited.
- dolmen 9y ago
  Rate and time spent on the service.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Somehow this does not add up with the PTSN era of the internet and with the current options to be billed on your ISP bill such as internet+[1]. [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet+ https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet+ http://internetplus.fr/ http://internetplus.fr/
bsaul 9y ago
Funny anecdote : the founder of "free" internet provider, xavier niel, made his first bucks running a minitel service ( an erotic service iirc, what people called "minitel rose"), then later completely disrupted french internet dsl access by offering unlimited high speed access for a few bucks a month. I worked at france telecom at the time ( the old monopolistic company that owned all the coper lines), and i remember employees not believing this offer to be real.
w8rbt 9y ago
People who find this interesting may like to read more about the AlohaNET, PRNET, SATNET and AMPRNet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Aloha_and_PRNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Aloha_and_PRNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet
flodor 9y ago
Minitel was also used a lot for chatrooms (most of them for sexual purposes). Of course most of the women in those chatrooms where men working for the service. A few guys has made a lot of money with it (the creator from "Free" french internet provider). It is extremly funny because on the picture you can see a list of nicknames, it looks like some bdsm chatroom :)
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Also Marc Simoncini (creator of meetic), and there's a few others.

86 points by ForHackernews 9y ago

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 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.

mojuba 9y ago
> 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.
- fabrice_d 9y ago
  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
  - glandium 9y ago
    When I was in middle school, I was participating in a meteorological club, and we had such a minitel server. People from around could phone in with their minitel, and get the information we'd put there for them. The few kids in the club collected data from a small weather station, compiled it, and put it there. We'd also sometimes redesign the presentation of the minitel "site". We were coached by a maths teacher, and that was part of what got me into computers (I had an Oric Atmos at home, the club was the first time I had access to PCs (with Windows 2! But we'd most usually run DOS); we had access to some Thomson MO5 in primary school before that).
    - astrobe_ 9y ago
      IIRC some variants of the Minitel had a RS232 port. I've seen it used to program alarm systems on site.
      - fabrice_d 9y ago
        Even the Minitel 1 had a rs232 port, on a non standard connector. Super slow though, 75/1200 bauds :)
      - glandium 9y ago
        IIRC, all the minitels above and including the 1B had a serial port, but it was through a DIN connector. We were using that to test our "site" by feeding it directly from a PC. I'm not sure the Minitel 1 had one.
      - fermigier 9y ago
        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 ;)
        jacquesm 9y ago
        That's more than most programmers.
- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  > Internet was a decentralized That's the key word: was. Now that the web has mostly eaten the internet, the network has been centred around a few nodes. And we still have the asymmetric bandwidth that is the primary driver of centralisation. Make no mistake, the internet has become just a centralised and consumer-oriented than the minitel was. Even I don't host my own web site, for 2 reasons: HTTP doesn't scale, and I don't have enough upload.
  - dorfsmay 9y ago
    If your website is small enough, not getting many visits, does it need to scale? CDNs are becoming a cheap commodity.
    - wott 9y ago
      > CDNs are becoming a cheap commodity. And then all sites are centralised again at Cloudflare and a handful of others.
      - dorfsmay 9y ago
        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 to a different one is as simple as a one DNS record change, hence my saying that they have become a commodity, completely the opposite of your assertion that "all site are centralised". Note that I do think that the internet is becoming more centralised, but in my opinion the issue is long term maintenance. Small site run by a single person will disappear when that person stops maintaining it, or dies... I have no solution to this issue, but it is one of the reason I give to archive.org. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...
        9y ago
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  There was a minitel service "3615 internet" that offered internet access to minitel users, the guy behind this service valentin lacambre used the money to finance altern.org. Here's an interesting snippet of history from "une contre-histoire des internets": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2hA3Bvm1n4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2hA3Bvm1n4
omginternets 9y ago
>Even so it took until 2012(!) before Minitel was finally decommissioned. As a point of interest, there are still buildings that use (local) minitel systems to manage security, elevators, electricity, etc. It's not uncommon to see contractors with a minitel terminal in the back of the truck.
cm2187 9y ago
The France Telecom monopoly on telephone line probably did more to slow down broadband adoption that the minitel.
- wott 9y ago
  I don't think so. There was a huge raise in prices when the market opened.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    I don't remember that. I mostly remember that I could finally use by 8Mbit modem at 8Mbit instead of the 1Mbit or 500kbit (can't remember which) to which France Telecom was artificially capping it.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    Are you talking about local-loop unbundling ?
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  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.
rainbowmverse 9y ago
This seems similar to the situation the US is in with broadband and mobile. We already had this big decades-long investment in copper (cable and phone) and old cell towers, so it was easier to just keep using, maintaining, and expanding it while the rest of the world got (or is getting) affordable high cap (or no cap) 4G and fiber to the home. Comcast is in the middle of rolling out gigabit everywhere after Google lit a fire under their butts, so I guess we'll catch up with the rest of the world eventually in our own stumbling, expensive way.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

yclopediaen 9y ago

In other words, a nation state sponsored AOL in France. Facebook is headed to the same cemetery.

arnaudsm 9y ago

Surprisingly, the Internet is becoming centralized like the Minitel was. Is history repeating itself?

johnflan 9y ago
Specifically, the Apple app eco system comes to mind.
- freehunter 9y ago
  Apple's apps have nothing to do with an open or closed Internet.
  - kyberias 9y ago
    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?
    - freehunter 9y ago
      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.
      - bigbugbag 9y ago
        Maybe I'm wrong but my interpretation was quite different. To me he's just pointing out a fact, to me along the 20+ years since I've been aware of the issue many things happened or didn't happen but a few specific things come out of the pack, including the one he cited. To me you came out as the apple fanboy who cannot stand that apple is part of the issue and that it is undeniably apple who popularized the "app store" model, emblematic of the problem at hands. It's only after apple's success that the others followed suit and copied the model to recreate their own distinct impossible to interconnect ecosystem. Even Mozilla has one now. Yes Apple is among the GAFAM who are to blame among many others for the current state of things, but ultimately the failure is in us who chose voluntary submission to new masters, who failed to use our technical knowledge to provide to other less technically inclined, who failed to force ISP to offer the means to self host, and so on I guess this is quite an illustration of "don't argue with fools, from a distance people may not be able to tell the difference".

Xoros 9y ago

As 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.

okket 9y ago
Just for the record: We had a similar experience with banks in Germany, it was called "Bildschirmtext" or "BTX". It took a long time and a lot of emulators until they finally adopted the Internet. Besides this, BTX was not as omnipresent as Minitel was in France.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  "Bildschirmtext" (BTX) is almost as old as Minitel and technically very similar, but it was largely unsuccessful because consumers had to buy expensive decoders to use it. The German postal service held a monopoly on the decoders that prevented competition and lower prices. Few people bought the boxes, so there was little incentive for companies to post content, which in turn did nothing to further box sales. When the monopoly was loosened, it was too late because PC-based online services had started to appear. http://www.liquisearch.com/minitel/minitel_in_other_countries http://www.liquisearch.com/minitel/minitel_in_other_countrie...

evaneykelen 9y ago

I've always wondered how much Tim Berners-Lee was inspired by Minitel given the fact that he must have frequently seen or even used them in the area around CERN.

rjsw 9y ago
The UK had Prestel [1], it wasn't nearly as widely used as Minitel though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel

evaneykelen 9y ago

I've always wondered how much Tim Berners-Lee was inspired by Minitel given the fact that he must have frequently seen or even used them in the area around CERN.

codecamper 9y ago

I never got to use a Minitel. :( Don't forget Plato. That was my first experience with a networked computer. In about 1985 in Escanaba Michigan no less. I remember chatting with someone on the Dungeons and dragons type Wizardry game & learning they were in California. Whoa! ( I was about 10 or 11 ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQV9sj4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQV9sj4I

fnj 9y ago

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).

throwaway2048 9y ago
You might even say he invented minitel
dolmen 9y ago
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel : The service was rolled out experimentally in 1978 in Brittany and throughout France in 1982

cm2187 9y ago

Interestingly, the minitel solved the monetization problem as visitors would automatically be billed by the phone company at the rate chosen by the service they visited.

dolmen 9y ago
Rate and time spent on the service.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Somehow this does not add up with the PTSN era of the internet and with the current options to be billed on your ISP bill such as internet+[1]. [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet+ https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet+ http://internetplus.fr/ http://internetplus.fr/

bsaul 9y ago

Funny anecdote : the founder of "free" internet provider, xavier niel, made his first bucks running a minitel service ( an erotic service iirc, what people called "minitel rose"), then later completely disrupted french internet dsl access by offering unlimited high speed access for a few bucks a month. I worked at france telecom at the time ( the old monopolistic company that owned all the coper lines), and i remember employees not believing this offer to be real.

w8rbt 9y ago

People who find this interesting may like to read more about the AlohaNET, PRNET, SATNET and AMPRNet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Aloha_and_PRNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Aloha_and_PRNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet

flodor 9y ago

Minitel was also used a lot for chatrooms (most of them for sexual purposes). Of course most of the women in those chatrooms where men working for the service. A few guys has made a lot of money with it (the creator from "Free" french internet provider). It is extremly funny because on the picture you can see a list of nicknames, it looks like some bdsm chatroom :)

bigbugbag 9y ago
Also Marc Simoncini (creator of meetic), and there's a few others.