8 ms·

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

66 points by bane 9y ago

candiodari 9y ago
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, some very creative "graphical" stuff), ...). Then those scams become so pervasive that trust in the system is completely lost, which makes it useless. Three, rapid mass abandonment when even a lower quality "free" alternative becomes available (internet over slow modems, hell, even BBSes posed a serious challenge to minitel). The thing people always forget to mention is that minitel was metered. Every second you spent on minitel was charged, with some part of that charge shared with the content provider. There were also content providers (ie. "webshops") that paid for the customers to be able to be on their site for free. The reaction to increased scams ? Why France Telecom stared charging more, of course, making the scams worse ... and worse ... and worse. Then suddenly all was abandoned in 2003 or so, with only paid-for sites remaining (essentially web banking, and some stock broker type stuff that's similar but more complex than web banking). Of course, the whole exercise was repeated with "value added services" on Cell phones in the late 90s and early 2000s (also charged by the "time spent online", and also filled to the brim with scams), and now again with android and iphone.
- Jraf 9y ago
  Hi, i disagree. A (dumb) terminal in each french house. For free ! in the 80's! As we had one in every house, there was "online" services which were very popular. Like school registration and ordering. And nationwide yellow pages! 24/7 ! Without the need to get to the post office to check for the county directory, on opening hours . It was also a wonderful tool to connect people in communities. There was different rate charge and the cheapest were very low. I remember spending nights and nights chatting. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTEL https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTEL
  - hazeii 9y ago
    Then, of course, there were the messageries roses (translated roughly as 'pink message areas' - adults only, of course!).
- blowski 9y ago
  Where there's brass, there's muck. I doubt it's even possible to create a system that's universally useful while not being susceptible to scams and all the other crappy bits of humanity.
  - duncan_bayne 9y ago
    Sure there is! It's actually pretty easy. Just send me the shipping costs by wire transfer and I'll post you a book that explains how.
- buserror 9y ago
  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 biggest after the lorry service were sport services (Stade 2 etc during footy times or Tour de France) -- then .gov stuff and education (exam results). I think for most people the 'pink services' were the ones that were advertised most, therefore there is a bias as to what was used and popular at the time, but from my point of view, it was nowhere near as popular as what people believe. For the technically minded, we were running a (lot) of Pr1me computers running Primos -- in fact we were their primary customers before they died; we eventually moved on to HPUX on the very first PA-RISC that came out. The Pr1mes continued ticking along for a long while...
  - candiodari 9y ago
    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 first onto BBS'es, then the internet came with some free server space included in virtually every internet package. A lot of these were initially let on the platform, then bled dry, and died. But minitel, without a doubt, could instead have pushed those services, and could have made it easy and cheap to host one of them, a decade before the internet arrived and it would have spread like wildfire instead of the internet, sooner, faster and with a few upgrades maybe even better. Instead, it charged by the second, made maybe 100 million euros total profit and died without any evolution at all. Because of France Telecom's business practices, everything on it was bled dry and was always losing money. And FT is a monopolist, they just bleed their services dry, and when they die, no replacement is forthcoming. At least things like Amazon have the decency to still offer the service when they destroy their supplyers. FT, however, just destroys. And it was all for nothing. Despite forcing these charges, it has (well, had, these days) a reputation in the financial industry for being a place where sometimes interesting companies become shady, then die. All killed in the name of France Telecom's business model, and nonexistent profits, just so it could do it's charge-by-the-second thing (perhaps you can notice that I'm not a fan of telcos). Just so all the "profit" could go to France Telecom and nobody else could maintain a living on it. Minitel is the ultimate example of France Telecom's economic sabotage : a massive monopolist that just couldn't stomach other people profiting even a bit of their platform and ending up destroying the market it had a monopoly over, all because of management incompetence, intransigence and utter indifference. It's not just that they didn't see the opportunity, as that requires looking for opportunities in the first place : they just didn't care. FT management is a reward position you get when some important politician owes you a favor, which makes it a given that high level managers are utterly incompetent, because either they are incompetent, or they're not incompetent and are aware that it's a favor : their days are numbered before they start, so they bleed the position for all it's worth and spend their time elsewhere.
- M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
  >Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service Which reminds me, that's also one of the rules of Project Xanadu: http://xanadu.com.au/general/faq.html#2 http://xanadu.com.au/general/faq.html#2 I wonder if that had turned out the same way had it ever been completed (or shall I say whether it will turn out the same way if it's ever completed?)
  - walshemj 9y ago
    yep that's why services that charged for every last thing didn't take off
- digi_owl 9y ago
  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".
  - candiodari 9y ago
    But minitel was different, the charge depended on the site you were on, and to some extent the charge was shared with the site. All sites on minitel were like premium-rate phone numbers, differently priced ones.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      So something akin to BBSs with a central registry?
      - candiodari 9y ago
        Something like the BBSes on premium numbers.
TeddyBear060 9y ago
For those who are interesting in "Minitel revival", a guy did some great job recreating a Minitel server ! https://www.jelora.fr/post/2017/08/27/Serveur-Minitel.html https://www.jelora.fr/post/2017/08/27/Serveur-Minitel.html
- Narishma 9y ago
  It's featured extensively in the video.
  - TeddyBear060 9y ago
    You're right. I just listen to the first 4 minutes and it remains me this wonderful post.
hazeii 9y ago
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 that visit (mostly increased upper-body strength).
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  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!
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Heh When I worked in the TEC tymnet engineering centre we had an ex phone phreak who had got done by BT security for hacking Prestel. One day the SD officer who arrested him bumped into him and freaked and demanded he be sacked - senior mangers told SD to piss off.
  - hazeii 9y ago
    That'd be 'coder' to you, Sir! Sorry about the bills - I always felt bad about them.
    - Jaruzel 9y ago
      Ah yeah, 'Hazeii the Coder' - I'm old, my memory is not what it was! Do you have anything to do with the Shades that runs at games.world.co.uk ?
      - hazeii 9y ago
        Yes, Perialaga hosts it and I look in from time to time. Write a message on the chattrack if you make it back there!
KeitIG 9y ago
One of the "funny" thing with the minitel was it was originally designed to be a set of services. During the first experimentations at a city-scale, people used it to find old friends from school ect. Then it ended up with its traffic being mostly directed to erotic services (mostly online chats). It would be interesting to compare the bandwidth percentage used at the time for those services, and the one from today with Internet.
- hazeii 9y ago
  Block graphics and text at 1200/75 baud - say 1 million people online and all busy typing, that's 75 x 1E6 x 8 upstream so it wouldn't trouble a single 1Gb ethernet link. Downstream would be 16 times that, so 10Gb would handle it all. Of course, in practice a lot of time the line would be idle so actually numbers would have been far less than that. Prestel in the UK (very similar to Minitel, also 1200/75) ran on around 10 GEC 'mainframes', which I was 'privileged' to spent many hours around. Each mainframe ran at a whole 1MIP, amd there were seried ranks of disk and tape drives to accompany them. Edit: Number formatting.
  - richrichardsson 9y ago
    I think they were more interested in how the relative percentages of bandwidth usage by type (erotic versus other uses) compares to today's patterns. I'd hazard a guess that people have generally been equally interested in sex over the years. :) Although I do wonder what the gender demographic split was like back then online, again I'd hazard a guess at a greater proportion of males compared with today.
    - hazeii 9y ago
      I strongly suspect the interactive (mostly adult) services were the bulk of the bandwidth; the rest of it was relatively short, infrequent and low-bandwidth sessions like looking up phone numbers, catalogue ordering or paying the odd bill. There's some info in the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances) about usage and finance which quotes revenues of over $1bn p.a. in 1998. I'd guess that while interest in sex hasn't changed, it does seem the bulk of bandwidth on Minitel went on online chat (erotic/flirting) - likely much more so as a proportion of the total than on the modern internet. I recall Paris (and the Metro in particular) at that time being plastered with (mostly-pink) adverts for 3615 chat services (the Minitel equivalent of a URL).
duncan_bayne 9y ago
I seem to recall Minitel was cracked, too, and used to spread spoof stock prices? Read about it in high school in the 90s but can't find anything about it on Google.
moviuro 9y ago
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.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  https://imgur.com/a/R6pFi https://imgur.com/a/R6pFi Yep, the adapter is easy to build. The minitel character set also has some handy glyphs in it for graphics.
  - andrelaszlo 9y ago
    That's awesome! Do you have more information/documentation?
    - amiga-workbench 9y ago
      http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361 http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361 Sure, I used this guide. http://millevaches.hydraule.org/info/minitel/specs/ http://millevaches.hydraule.org/info/minitel/specs/ Here is some information on the character codes too.
      - hazeii 9y ago
        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?
        amiga-workbench 9y ago
        Those sound quite helpful. I'd love get a setup where I could talk to my minitel directly over its POTS line rather than having to enter the hotkey for serial terminal every time I power it on.
agumonkey 9y ago
The irony is even stronger if you consider that Louis Pouzin was a strong inspirator of packet based communications (having just done the cyclades network system) and TCP/IP but for some reason the French national telecom agency didn't believe in it and stuck with a different protocol for too long.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  My understanding is that telecom in general balked at packet switching. To them it violated the core tenent of their business, that of maintaining a continous circuit between customers.
hawkinsw 9y ago
If you like that video, you might enjoy this great book about Minitel: https://www.amazon.com/Minitel-Welcome-Internet-Platform-Studies/dp/0262036223/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497646280&sr=8-1&keywords=Minitel+Welcome+to+the+Internet https://www.amazon.com/Minitel-Welcome-Internet-Platform-Stu... I have started to read it, but haven't made it all the way through. I love tech history and the book is great so far!
ekianjo 9y ago
tech treasure? Seriously? Nostalgia aside, it was slow and expensive to use. Internet had no penetration in France at the time so a crappy solution that does things worse and made France late to pick up Internet afterwards hardly qualifies as a treasure in my book.
- ptaipale 9y ago
  The Minitel service was rolled out 1978-1982, about a dozen years before widespread commercial adoption of Internet connections for consumers in any country. So the Internet penetration is not really relevant here. Yes, existing legacy technology sometimes works so well that newer things have a hard time replacing it.
  - nolok 9y ago
    It should be added that it wasn't made technically irrelevant the minute internet appeared either, Minitel had a few things figured out (thanks to its centralized monolithic ways) that took internet a while to achieve. Most important of those due to centralisation, the service-tied-to-a-paying-number and several numbers for different price point; payment and authenticity were the norm. Selling stuff to every days common users was a normality, it was done without any security risk, and an impersonator pretending to be your bank or whatever would be much taken out by France Telecom. Meanwhile we were still trying to convince people they could buy on the internet by the late 90's, and how to recognize which site is their official bank and which one is a scam. PS: Xavier Niel (the CEO/founder of Free/Illiad) is well known for having made his money on paid minitel adult services. We suffered late internet adoption because of the minitel, yes, but that's because the minitel had been so good for so long that it had become part of our normal life by then.
    - masklinn 9y ago
      > Most important of those due to centralisation, the service-tied-to-a-paying-number and several numbers for different price point; payment and authenticity were the norm. And service providers could do both IAP-style (pay-for-bundle) and ongoing-style (pay-for-stay), the latter being a great model for news services or story providers (serials and the like).
andrelaszlo 9y ago
I recently bought a Minitel (v2 I think). Any ideas about what to do with it? I'm thinking something with a Raspberry Pi.
- hazeii 9y ago
  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.

66 points by bane 9y ago

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, some very creative "graphical" stuff), ...). Then those scams become so pervasive that trust in the system is completely lost, which makes it useless. Three, rapid mass abandonment when even a lower quality "free" alternative becomes available (internet over slow modems, hell, even BBSes posed a serious challenge to minitel). The thing people always forget to mention is that minitel was metered. Every second you spent on minitel was charged, with some part of that charge shared with the content provider. There were also content providers (ie. "webshops") that paid for the customers to be able to be on their site for free. The reaction to increased scams ? Why France Telecom stared charging more, of course, making the scams worse ... and worse ... and worse. Then suddenly all was abandoned in 2003 or so, with only paid-for sites remaining (essentially web banking, and some stock broker type stuff that's similar but more complex than web banking). Of course, the whole exercise was repeated with "value added services" on Cell phones in the late 90s and early 2000s (also charged by the "time spent online", and also filled to the brim with scams), and now again with android and iphone.

Jraf 9y ago
Hi, i disagree. A (dumb) terminal in each french house. For free ! in the 80's! As we had one in every house, there was "online" services which were very popular. Like school registration and ordering. And nationwide yellow pages! 24/7 ! Without the need to get to the post office to check for the county directory, on opening hours . It was also a wonderful tool to connect people in communities. There was different rate charge and the cheapest were very low. I remember spending nights and nights chatting. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTEL https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTEL
- hazeii 9y ago
  Then, of course, there were the messageries roses (translated roughly as 'pink message areas' - adults only, of course!).
blowski 9y ago
Where there's brass, there's muck. I doubt it's even possible to create a system that's universally useful while not being susceptible to scams and all the other crappy bits of humanity.
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  Sure there is! It's actually pretty easy. Just send me the shipping costs by wire transfer and I'll post you a book that explains how.
buserror 9y ago
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 biggest after the lorry service were sport services (Stade 2 etc during footy times or Tour de France) -- then .gov stuff and education (exam results). I think for most people the 'pink services' were the ones that were advertised most, therefore there is a bias as to what was used and popular at the time, but from my point of view, it was nowhere near as popular as what people believe. For the technically minded, we were running a (lot) of Pr1me computers running Primos -- in fact we were their primary customers before they died; we eventually moved on to HPUX on the very first PA-RISC that came out. The Pr1mes continued ticking along for a long while...
- candiodari 9y ago
  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 first onto BBS'es, then the internet came with some free server space included in virtually every internet package. A lot of these were initially let on the platform, then bled dry, and died. But minitel, without a doubt, could instead have pushed those services, and could have made it easy and cheap to host one of them, a decade before the internet arrived and it would have spread like wildfire instead of the internet, sooner, faster and with a few upgrades maybe even better. Instead, it charged by the second, made maybe 100 million euros total profit and died without any evolution at all. Because of France Telecom's business practices, everything on it was bled dry and was always losing money. And FT is a monopolist, they just bleed their services dry, and when they die, no replacement is forthcoming. At least things like Amazon have the decency to still offer the service when they destroy their supplyers. FT, however, just destroys. And it was all for nothing. Despite forcing these charges, it has (well, had, these days) a reputation in the financial industry for being a place where sometimes interesting companies become shady, then die. All killed in the name of France Telecom's business model, and nonexistent profits, just so it could do it's charge-by-the-second thing (perhaps you can notice that I'm not a fan of telcos). Just so all the "profit" could go to France Telecom and nobody else could maintain a living on it. Minitel is the ultimate example of France Telecom's economic sabotage : a massive monopolist that just couldn't stomach other people profiting even a bit of their platform and ending up destroying the market it had a monopoly over, all because of management incompetence, intransigence and utter indifference. It's not just that they didn't see the opportunity, as that requires looking for opportunities in the first place : they just didn't care. FT management is a reward position you get when some important politician owes you a favor, which makes it a given that high level managers are utterly incompetent, because either they are incompetent, or they're not incompetent and are aware that it's a favor : their days are numbered before they start, so they bleed the position for all it's worth and spend their time elsewhere.
M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
>Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service Which reminds me, that's also one of the rules of Project Xanadu: http://xanadu.com.au/general/faq.html#2 http://xanadu.com.au/general/faq.html#2 I wonder if that had turned out the same way had it ever been completed (or shall I say whether it will turn out the same way if it's ever completed?)
- walshemj 9y ago
  yep that's why services that charged for every last thing didn't take off
digi_owl 9y ago
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".
- candiodari 9y ago
  But minitel was different, the charge depended on the site you were on, and to some extent the charge was shared with the site. All sites on minitel were like premium-rate phone numbers, differently priced ones.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    So something akin to BBSs with a central registry?
    - candiodari 9y ago
      Something like the BBSes on premium numbers.

TeddyBear060 9y ago

For those who are interesting in "Minitel revival", a guy did some great job recreating a Minitel server ! https://www.jelora.fr/post/2017/08/27/Serveur-Minitel.html https://www.jelora.fr/post/2017/08/27/Serveur-Minitel.html

Narishma 9y ago
It's featured extensively in the video.
- TeddyBear060 9y ago
  You're right. I just listen to the first 4 minutes and it remains me this wonderful post.

hazeii 9y ago

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 that visit (mostly increased upper-body strength).

Jaruzel 9y ago
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!
- walshemj 9y ago
  Heh When I worked in the TEC tymnet engineering centre we had an ex phone phreak who had got done by BT security for hacking Prestel. One day the SD officer who arrested him bumped into him and freaked and demanded he be sacked - senior mangers told SD to piss off.
- hazeii 9y ago
  That'd be 'coder' to you, Sir! Sorry about the bills - I always felt bad about them.
  - Jaruzel 9y ago
    Ah yeah, 'Hazeii the Coder' - I'm old, my memory is not what it was! Do you have anything to do with the Shades that runs at games.world.co.uk ?
    - hazeii 9y ago
      Yes, Perialaga hosts it and I look in from time to time. Write a message on the chattrack if you make it back there!

KeitIG 9y ago

One of the "funny" thing with the minitel was it was originally designed to be a set of services. During the first experimentations at a city-scale, people used it to find old friends from school ect. Then it ended up with its traffic being mostly directed to erotic services (mostly online chats). It would be interesting to compare the bandwidth percentage used at the time for those services, and the one from today with Internet.

hazeii 9y ago
Block graphics and text at 1200/75 baud - say 1 million people online and all busy typing, that's 75 x 1E6 x 8 upstream so it wouldn't trouble a single 1Gb ethernet link. Downstream would be 16 times that, so 10Gb would handle it all. Of course, in practice a lot of time the line would be idle so actually numbers would have been far less than that. Prestel in the UK (very similar to Minitel, also 1200/75) ran on around 10 GEC 'mainframes', which I was 'privileged' to spent many hours around. Each mainframe ran at a whole 1MIP, amd there were seried ranks of disk and tape drives to accompany them. Edit: Number formatting.
- richrichardsson 9y ago
  I think they were more interested in how the relative percentages of bandwidth usage by type (erotic versus other uses) compares to today's patterns. I'd hazard a guess that people have generally been equally interested in sex over the years. :) Although I do wonder what the gender demographic split was like back then online, again I'd hazard a guess at a greater proportion of males compared with today.
  - hazeii 9y ago
    I strongly suspect the interactive (mostly adult) services were the bulk of the bandwidth; the rest of it was relatively short, infrequent and low-bandwidth sessions like looking up phone numbers, catalogue ordering or paying the odd bill. There's some info in the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances) about usage and finance which quotes revenues of over $1bn p.a. in 1998. I'd guess that while interest in sex hasn't changed, it does seem the bulk of bandwidth on Minitel went on online chat (erotic/flirting) - likely much more so as a proportion of the total than on the modern internet. I recall Paris (and the Metro in particular) at that time being plastered with (mostly-pink) adverts for 3615 chat services (the Minitel equivalent of a URL).

duncan_bayne 9y ago

I seem to recall Minitel was cracked, too, and used to spread spoof stock prices? Read about it in high school in the 90s but can't find anything about it on Google.

moviuro 9y ago

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.

amiga-workbench 9y ago
https://imgur.com/a/R6pFi https://imgur.com/a/R6pFi Yep, the adapter is easy to build. The minitel character set also has some handy glyphs in it for graphics.
- andrelaszlo 9y ago
  That's awesome! Do you have more information/documentation?
  - amiga-workbench 9y ago
    http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361 http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361 Sure, I used this guide. http://millevaches.hydraule.org/info/minitel/specs/ http://millevaches.hydraule.org/info/minitel/specs/ Here is some information on the character codes too.
    - hazeii 9y ago
      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?
      - amiga-workbench 9y ago
        Those sound quite helpful. I'd love get a setup where I could talk to my minitel directly over its POTS line rather than having to enter the hotkey for serial terminal every time I power it on.

agumonkey 9y ago

The irony is even stronger if you consider that Louis Pouzin was a strong inspirator of packet based communications (having just done the cyclades network system) and TCP/IP but for some reason the French national telecom agency didn't believe in it and stuck with a different protocol for too long.

digi_owl 9y ago
My understanding is that telecom in general balked at packet switching. To them it violated the core tenent of their business, that of maintaining a continous circuit between customers.

hawkinsw 9y ago

If you like that video, you might enjoy this great book about Minitel: https://www.amazon.com/Minitel-Welcome-Internet-Platform-Studies/dp/0262036223/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497646280&sr=8-1&keywords=Minitel+Welcome+to+the+Internet https://www.amazon.com/Minitel-Welcome-Internet-Platform-Stu... I have started to read it, but haven't made it all the way through. I love tech history and the book is great so far!

ekianjo 9y ago

tech treasure? Seriously? Nostalgia aside, it was slow and expensive to use. Internet had no penetration in France at the time so a crappy solution that does things worse and made France late to pick up Internet afterwards hardly qualifies as a treasure in my book.

ptaipale 9y ago
The Minitel service was rolled out 1978-1982, about a dozen years before widespread commercial adoption of Internet connections for consumers in any country. So the Internet penetration is not really relevant here. Yes, existing legacy technology sometimes works so well that newer things have a hard time replacing it.
- nolok 9y ago
  It should be added that it wasn't made technically irrelevant the minute internet appeared either, Minitel had a few things figured out (thanks to its centralized monolithic ways) that took internet a while to achieve. Most important of those due to centralisation, the service-tied-to-a-paying-number and several numbers for different price point; payment and authenticity were the norm. Selling stuff to every days common users was a normality, it was done without any security risk, and an impersonator pretending to be your bank or whatever would be much taken out by France Telecom. Meanwhile we were still trying to convince people they could buy on the internet by the late 90's, and how to recognize which site is their official bank and which one is a scam. PS: Xavier Niel (the CEO/founder of Free/Illiad) is well known for having made his money on paid minitel adult services. We suffered late internet adoption because of the minitel, yes, but that's because the minitel had been so good for so long that it had become part of our normal life by then.
  - masklinn 9y ago
    > Most important of those due to centralisation, the service-tied-to-a-paying-number and several numbers for different price point; payment and authenticity were the norm. And service providers could do both IAP-style (pay-for-bundle) and ongoing-style (pay-for-stay), the latter being a great model for news services or story providers (serials and the like).

andrelaszlo 9y ago

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

hazeii 9y ago
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.