5 ms·

A couple historical anecdotes: There was the equivalent of the hug of death multiple times every year when students were checking their results, overloading th

by lloeki 9y ago

A couple historical anecdotes: There was the equivalent of the hug of death multiple times every year when students were checking their results, overloading the servers as (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people tried to furiously dial in simultaneously to get results from various nationwide exams such as the infamous Baccalauréat. In 1981 for the presidential elections, the result was broadcasted live on the Minitel and showed up live on the news: (On TV) https://youtu.be/rJHUZNlO9ao https://youtu.be/rJHUZNlO9ao (Remastered Minitel output) https://youtu.be/JIZ_D34J3-I https://youtu.be/JIZ_D34J3-I The Minitel was such a national pride that the Internet had a hard time piercing through the habits and the collective mind, setting back France by a couple of years on that front. Said misplaced pride is also very visible on some other bad decision making such as forcefully applying national preference to technology such as Bull computers in the enterprise or Thomson TO7&MO5 in schools which were ripped apart by the competition nonetheless. This behavior is still visible today as the government tried to push for "the French Cloud" by heavily subsidizing software such as a poor alternative to Dropbox which became Orange Cloud or looking the other way when Deezer was clearly violating IP rights by padding its music catalogue as it was missing deals from the majors. Same goes with banks shunning Apple/Android Pay in favor of being hell-bent on that sad sad Paylib thing, and various other similar heavy cases of NIH. I'm tentatively hopeful but very cautions about that "French SV" thing. Wait&see.

bengalister 9y ago
The solutions of the "baccalaureat", high school end of course exam were also available online just a few hours after the exam, if not immediately after. I still wonder who entered the them and how they got them so quickly. I guess some paid teachers who were able to get a copy of the exam tests or even illegal copies before the exam took place. I remember spending quite some time checking all online the solutions of the Math exam.
makapuf 9y ago
I think there indeed is national pride from the French Tech. I don't think USA is totally immune from it. How many non USA services do US people use ? Of course many were invented here but some were not and were reimplememted.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  There is also a big "buy American" push in general, as best i can tell.
  - nradov 9y ago
    "Buy American" mostly only applies to the federal government. Everywhere else it's mostly just talk.
    - dghughes 9y ago
      I'm not from the USA but I do live in the Americas so technically buy American means anywhere in this region ;)
      - briandear 9y ago
        Actually technically it doesn’t. America is the short name of the United States of America. North America is a continent. South America is a continent. There is no such place as “America” unless you are referring to the United States. “Americans” refers to the nationality of one from the United States. It’s the adjective describing “something from the United States.” I have never heard anyone in Brazil refer to themselves as American. That’s just nonsense and no product from Paraguay is stamped with Hecho en America. Interestingly, people from the US or Canada are referred to as North Americans by Mexicans – despite Mexico being in North America.
        digi_owl 9y ago
        Note the use of America_s_. The s there is something i have seen often used to encompass all the nations of the American continent.
        dghughes 9y ago
        Yes. Africa = Africans Europe = Europeans Asian = Asians Americas = ?
danmaz74 9y ago
As a non-French, I wouldn't say that being proud of the Minitel was misplaced at the beginning, as it was a great accomplishment for its time. The problem was sticking to it when a clearly superior alternative emerged - reminds me of the "not invented here" problem. Regarding "national preference", no EU country is big enough to make that work for these kinds of technology; maybe the EU as a whole, if there wasn't the big problem of language...
- masklinn 9y ago
  > The problem was sticking to it when a clearly superior alternative emerged - reminds me of the "not invented here" problem. One of the issues here is that the internet was not "a clearly superior alternative" as it had some aspects which were (and still are) significant downgrades. Monetisation is a big one, Minitel had use-time payment very early on ("kiosk" services with a 4:2 split between the service and the network operator, with multiple price points) and in the early 90s added secure standardised CC payment (new models had a CC reader/terminal built in).
  - danmaz74 9y ago
    Well, if you prefer, let's say "an alternative that was obviously going to win on the market". PS As a consumer I find it very hard to say that use-time payment is better than flat access cost + many different ways to pay depending on what you use.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      It was not obvious that internet was going to win the market, there were barely any home computers in France vs a few millions minitel, there were pretty much no commercial ISP but local non profit ISPs and the national phone operator was raking in huge profit from the minitel and had no incentive to upgrade its inadequate infrastructure.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      You seem to assume that the internet is flat fee, that is historically not the case. The internet was pay by the hour or pay by the kB for a very long time. The flat free subscriptions only emerged around the 00's.
trumbitta2 9y ago
It's a more general attitude, and it's called Autarchy (you may know it in its weaker form: NIMB + NIH not invented here). Thank Nazifascism for that. Italy had it, but it quickly fade out in the 1960's. Spain and France still have it. Hopefully less and less as time goes by.
- trumbitta2 9y ago
  I'm sorry if this makes you uncomfortable. It's just true.
gaius 9y ago
It's a shame the French government doesn't mandate OCaml for all their software projects. If the UK government had forced the public sector to use Acorn Archimedes instead of crappy PCs we would be at least a decade ahead now, maybe two.
- comstock 9y ago
  Not sure... I was a massive Acorn fan. But looking back, I'm not sure how far ahead of MacOS RiscOS really was. It was an advance on MSDos/Windows of course... but that wasn't the best thing out there by any means. ARMs were (still are) nice processors, and have obviously lived on and done well.
- staofbur 9y ago
  I've been lurking here for a few months and this has motivated me to comment. As a former prolific RiscPC user, the hardware and software was rubbish at a technical level even if it worked well from an end user perspective. I would not want to run a browser or any thin client software on the platform. There is no memory protection or privilege separation. I watched a whole Econet deployment get wrecked by a virus once. They just binned it and got netware and windows NT in because it was less crazy in the end.
peter303 9y ago
So they just sue giant US software companies for monoply and privacy violations. Possibly a bit of not-invented-here frustration in those suits.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Yeah or maybe those US companies are monopolies that heavily violate people privacy while engaging in tax fraud.
piettes 9y ago
Or maybe switching from "nothing" to "internet" has way more outcomes than switching from "minitel" to "internet", and that's why internet took more time to grow in France ? And there might be a thousand reasons not to host your data in the USA, and that's why they search for local alternative. Stop simplifying everything to "French pride", that's just a myth.
bigbugbag 9y ago
There's quite a few of things that requires sources or debunking in here: France being set back by a couple years on the internet front due to minitel, misplaced pride and sliding to totally different matter, to7/mo5 being ripped apart by competition, talking of today government as if it was the same than in the 1980's.
walshemj 9y ago
Back when I worked for the UK version of Minitel (Prestel) for high profile events such as budget day staff where asked not to use it. Thigh as I worked on the Byzantine Prestel billing system we had permission to use the budget pages and also listened live to the speech in case the government did something fun like change VAT (sales tax) in the middle of the month.
dreamfactory2 9y ago
Insisting on homegrown platforms is starting to work out extremely well for China. Could be argued that France just hasn't gone anywhere near hard enough on that front and the government needs to seriously play the role of national tech incubator as China does

by lloeki 9y ago

bengalister 9y ago

The solutions of the "baccalaureat", high school end of course exam were also available online just a few hours after the exam, if not immediately after. I still wonder who entered the them and how they got them so quickly. I guess some paid teachers who were able to get a copy of the exam tests or even illegal copies before the exam took place. I remember spending quite some time checking all online the solutions of the Math exam.

makapuf 9y ago

I think there indeed is national pride from the French Tech. I don't think USA is totally immune from it. How many non USA services do US people use ? Of course many were invented here but some were not and were reimplememted.

digi_owl 9y ago
There is also a big "buy American" push in general, as best i can tell.
- nradov 9y ago
  "Buy American" mostly only applies to the federal government. Everywhere else it's mostly just talk.
  - dghughes 9y ago
    I'm not from the USA but I do live in the Americas so technically buy American means anywhere in this region ;)
    - briandear 9y ago
      Actually technically it doesn’t. America is the short name of the United States of America. North America is a continent. South America is a continent. There is no such place as “America” unless you are referring to the United States. “Americans” refers to the nationality of one from the United States. It’s the adjective describing “something from the United States.” I have never heard anyone in Brazil refer to themselves as American. That’s just nonsense and no product from Paraguay is stamped with Hecho en America. Interestingly, people from the US or Canada are referred to as North Americans by Mexicans – despite Mexico being in North America.
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        Note the use of America_s_. The s there is something i have seen often used to encompass all the nations of the American continent.
        dghughes 9y ago
        Yes. Africa = Africans Europe = Europeans Asian = Asians Americas = ?

danmaz74 9y ago

As a non-French, I wouldn't say that being proud of the Minitel was misplaced at the beginning, as it was a great accomplishment for its time. The problem was sticking to it when a clearly superior alternative emerged - reminds me of the "not invented here" problem. Regarding "national preference", no EU country is big enough to make that work for these kinds of technology; maybe the EU as a whole, if there wasn't the big problem of language...

masklinn 9y ago
> The problem was sticking to it when a clearly superior alternative emerged - reminds me of the "not invented here" problem. One of the issues here is that the internet was not "a clearly superior alternative" as it had some aspects which were (and still are) significant downgrades. Monetisation is a big one, Minitel had use-time payment very early on ("kiosk" services with a 4:2 split between the service and the network operator, with multiple price points) and in the early 90s added secure standardised CC payment (new models had a CC reader/terminal built in).
- danmaz74 9y ago
  Well, if you prefer, let's say "an alternative that was obviously going to win on the market". PS As a consumer I find it very hard to say that use-time payment is better than flat access cost + many different ways to pay depending on what you use.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    It was not obvious that internet was going to win the market, there were barely any home computers in France vs a few millions minitel, there were pretty much no commercial ISP but local non profit ISPs and the national phone operator was raking in huge profit from the minitel and had no incentive to upgrade its inadequate infrastructure.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    You seem to assume that the internet is flat fee, that is historically not the case. The internet was pay by the hour or pay by the kB for a very long time. The flat free subscriptions only emerged around the 00's.

trumbitta2 9y ago

It's a more general attitude, and it's called Autarchy (you may know it in its weaker form: NIMB + NIH not invented here). Thank Nazifascism for that. Italy had it, but it quickly fade out in the 1960's. Spain and France still have it. Hopefully less and less as time goes by.

trumbitta2 9y ago
I'm sorry if this makes you uncomfortable. It's just true.

gaius 9y ago

It's a shame the French government doesn't mandate OCaml for all their software projects. If the UK government had forced the public sector to use Acorn Archimedes instead of crappy PCs we would be at least a decade ahead now, maybe two.

comstock 9y ago
Not sure... I was a massive Acorn fan. But looking back, I'm not sure how far ahead of MacOS RiscOS really was. It was an advance on MSDos/Windows of course... but that wasn't the best thing out there by any means. ARMs were (still are) nice processors, and have obviously lived on and done well.
staofbur 9y ago
I've been lurking here for a few months and this has motivated me to comment. As a former prolific RiscPC user, the hardware and software was rubbish at a technical level even if it worked well from an end user perspective. I would not want to run a browser or any thin client software on the platform. There is no memory protection or privilege separation. I watched a whole Econet deployment get wrecked by a virus once. They just binned it and got netware and windows NT in because it was less crazy in the end.

peter303 9y ago

So they just sue giant US software companies for monoply and privacy violations. Possibly a bit of not-invented-here frustration in those suits.

bigbugbag 9y ago
Yeah or maybe those US companies are monopolies that heavily violate people privacy while engaging in tax fraud.

piettes 9y ago

Or maybe switching from "nothing" to "internet" has way more outcomes than switching from "minitel" to "internet", and that's why internet took more time to grow in France ? And there might be a thousand reasons not to host your data in the USA, and that's why they search for local alternative. Stop simplifying everything to "French pride", that's just a myth.

bigbugbag 9y ago

There's quite a few of things that requires sources or debunking in here: France being set back by a couple years on the internet front due to minitel, misplaced pride and sliding to totally different matter, to7/mo5 being ripped apart by competition, talking of today government as if it was the same than in the 1980's.

walshemj 9y ago

Back when I worked for the UK version of Minitel (Prestel) for high profile events such as budget day staff where asked not to use it. Thigh as I worked on the Byzantine Prestel billing system we had permission to use the budget pages and also listened live to the speech in case the government did something fun like change VAT (sales tax) in the middle of the month.

dreamfactory2 9y ago

Insisting on homegrown platforms is starting to work out extremely well for China. Could be argued that France just hasn't gone anywhere near hard enough on that front and the government needs to seriously play the role of national tech incubator as China does