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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

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.
- Jyaif 9y ago
  > made maybe 100 million euros total profit In 1998, Minitel generated €832 million of revenue, of which €521 million was channelled by France Télécom to service providers.
- buserror 9y ago
  The company I worked for was filthy rich with Minitel. I don't know where you heard there wasn't money in it, but even with Transpac charges it was making a scary bundle for the operators... Of course there might have been an economy of scale in our case, but it was scary. They were bringing Ruinart champagne /by the pallet/ for employees to enjoy. Basically you could throw a party any day (for anything! like "I've just got new shoes", and you had unlimited champagne. Remember that was in 1989 -- a LONG time before dot.com era and even a long time before the excess of the 90's. Also a long time before it became socially inadequate to be rather drunk at work (on champagne only, mind you). The employee benefits were also incredible, even by banking standard. I think we had 8 or 9 weeks paid holidays, and anything you didn't take was... paid to you at the end of the year, on top of the bonus (which was also generous). In other words, not exactly a company that was skimping...
  - candiodari 9y ago
    Okay, and what happened to that company past, say, 1998-2000 ?
    - buserror 9y ago
      Went into service, eventually became Atos origin. I doubt any of the original benefits survived!
walshemj 9y ago
Ineresting I never new that BT's other online service Telecom Gold also used Pr1me's I think we where the largest non black user in the UK - I used to have root on all of them and super root on the billing systems.
- buserror 9y ago
  The primary reason we used them was the pretty cool 'ring' LAN that was X25 based -- since everything else was X25/X29 (Transpac) it was a natural choice. Remember back then available ethernet was still coax. And speaking of root -- on the Pr1me was also 'root' as a system engineer, and I remember fondly the day I messed up the parenthesis in a macro, and ran a tool that proceeded to memset() and erase the whole of the shared memory on the machine. That was about 30 people who all called.... the system's engineer (me!) to ask what was going on! Needless to say, it was blamed on a cosmic ray. When we switched to HP it took quite a while to get the same level of performance with HP's own X25 hardware/software. It's also the one and only time I ever played with X25 socket() API.
- hazeii 9y ago
  I thought they were GEC's but might well have been Primes. I do recall being in Baynard House one night and having a furious shift leader burst in and shout that he wasn't putting up with Shades overloading various mainframes around the country ("what, my little box?" :) ). Although I never saw much backroom stuff on Minitel, from the outside it was pretty sweet compared to working with BT.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Prestel was GEC's GEC 4082's Telecom Gold Was Pr1mes I think all 750's I should have really had a trip out to baynard to check it out as I was I suppose the dev-op on the Dialcom side working on the new Billing system.

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.

Jyaif 9y ago
> made maybe 100 million euros total profit In 1998, Minitel generated €832 million of revenue, of which €521 million was channelled by France Télécom to service providers.
buserror 9y ago
The company I worked for was filthy rich with Minitel. I don't know where you heard there wasn't money in it, but even with Transpac charges it was making a scary bundle for the operators... Of course there might have been an economy of scale in our case, but it was scary. They were bringing Ruinart champagne /by the pallet/ for employees to enjoy. Basically you could throw a party any day (for anything! like "I've just got new shoes", and you had unlimited champagne. Remember that was in 1989 -- a LONG time before dot.com era and even a long time before the excess of the 90's. Also a long time before it became socially inadequate to be rather drunk at work (on champagne only, mind you). The employee benefits were also incredible, even by banking standard. I think we had 8 or 9 weeks paid holidays, and anything you didn't take was... paid to you at the end of the year, on top of the bonus (which was also generous). In other words, not exactly a company that was skimping...
- candiodari 9y ago
  Okay, and what happened to that company past, say, 1998-2000 ?
  - buserror 9y ago
    Went into service, eventually became Atos origin. I doubt any of the original benefits survived!

walshemj 9y ago

Ineresting I never new that BT's other online service Telecom Gold also used Pr1me's I think we where the largest non black user in the UK - I used to have root on all of them and super root on the billing systems.

buserror 9y ago
The primary reason we used them was the pretty cool 'ring' LAN that was X25 based -- since everything else was X25/X29 (Transpac) it was a natural choice. Remember back then available ethernet was still coax. And speaking of root -- on the Pr1me was also 'root' as a system engineer, and I remember fondly the day I messed up the parenthesis in a macro, and ran a tool that proceeded to memset() and erase the whole of the shared memory on the machine. That was about 30 people who all called.... the system's engineer (me!) to ask what was going on! Needless to say, it was blamed on a cosmic ray. When we switched to HP it took quite a while to get the same level of performance with HP's own X25 hardware/software. It's also the one and only time I ever played with X25 socket() API.
hazeii 9y ago
I thought they were GEC's but might well have been Primes. I do recall being in Baynard House one night and having a furious shift leader burst in and shout that he wasn't putting up with Shades overloading various mainframes around the country ("what, my little box?" :) ). Although I never saw much backroom stuff on Minitel, from the outside it was pretty sweet compared to working with BT.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Prestel was GEC's GEC 4082's Telecom Gold Was Pr1mes I think all 750's I should have really had a trip out to baynard to check it out as I was I suppose the dev-op on the Dialcom side working on the new Billing system.