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Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
- aphroz 6y agoThey missed the occasion to have built something global that would probably have carried European values. Probably because of a lack of communication outside french language. If I remember correctly all the parts where build in France. Later they could also have competed against YouTube, with one of the first video sharing websites, too bad they totally gave up against the US brands.
- nl 6y agoYou'd need to explain why it would have won against the internet when AOL/MSN/CompuServe didn't.
- aphroz 6y agoThey missed the opportunity as well, a lot did. I am not saying they would have succeeded for any specific reasons, but back then all the possibilities were there. Internet has become a nightmare, we lost everything that made it special when it started. Nowadays probably 90% of the non-porn traffic is going to Google, Amazon or Facebook and it becomes a problem for freedom of speech and "democracy". Concentration of such power or money is a problem.
- pjc50 6y agoMinitel was run by the French state, it doesn't get much more centralised than that! And of course far-right or Nazi messageboards would have got censored off it immediately. (I have no idea whether there was much politics content on minitel, but I've not heard of it, and would be interested in references)
- hyakosm 6y agoOn the french Minitel a lot of discussion forums were private owned and not really censored. I think the censorship is more heavy on facebook than it was on minitel services.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- phh 6y agoCompared to the internet, the Minitel lacked infrastructure: The Minitel was inherently Peer-To-Peer but only one peer at a time.
- philprx 6y agoSorry, I find that statement quite imprecise: you could connect to a single server at a time, just like a browser tab connects you to only one service at a time (even if it uses many libraries from many other http servers), so if you mean peer to peer this way, then yes. But then to do that, it connected to a massive infrastructure that was there and running with very high availability constraints, ... for the time ;-)
- johnchristopher 6y agoI remember my stepdad talking about “miditel“, which would have been the name of Minitel in Belgium. Don't know if France and Belgium were supposed to be connected, if it was the same network and operating entity or some kind of white mark thing. Or just speculation.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 6y agoI really doubt it would have won against the internet, but there's definitely a parallel universe in which the internet was preceded by a global (or at least pseudo-global) Minitel.
- Symbiote 6y agoThe WWW was invented at CERN, and perhaps has academic values (linking/citing). I don't know what European values you could mean though. Business websites that close for lunch? :)
- AshamedCaptain 6y agoFrench language might have actually got you further ahead in 40 years ago Europe than any other lang. Minitel arrived in some form or another in most European countries surrounding France. Spanish version was called Ibertexto.
- 082349872349872 6y agoEnglish is currently overwhelming in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_in_the_Eurovision_Song_Contest#Winners_by_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_in_the_Eurov... but 40 years ago it would've been 3 dutch and 7 english to 11 french.
- andrewstuart 6y agoAnd if you want to own a Minitel terminal, eBay France is loaded with them and they're beautiful and dirt cheap: https://www.ebay.fr/sch/i.html?_nkw=minitel https://www.ebay.fr/sch/i.html?_nkw=minitel
- philprx 6y agoAnd you can use some of them as a serial console using a simple TTL to serial voltage adapter. The following are compatible with 80 columns: Minitel 1B Minitel 2 And type the following after power on to switch to 80 cols: Function T+E
- MayeulC 6y agoI bought one some time ago, I'm still planning to put a Pi zero W or something similar inside, but never got around to do so.
- philprx 6y agoWhat you need to build the adapter: http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361 http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361 Use online translator and ping me if needed.
- anthk 6y agoCan I use a 230V minitel on a 220V plug in Spain? We use 50hz too.
- UncleSlacky 6y agoDon't see why not, most European equipment is built to handle a range of 220-240V at least, whatever the marking says. At worst the screen might display slightly smaller than intended.
- anthk 6y ago
- PeterStuer 6y agoMinitel was great for it's time, but its huge success in France resulted in the country later being slower than other European countries to adopt the WWW.
- nowahe 6y agoWe have a saying in France about the minitel. It first put us 20 years ahead of everyone, and then 20 years behind
- agumonkey 6y agoProbably a common issue with tech choices.
- Jugurtha 6y agoI would love a Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber book on this. Something like "Le défi américain".
- aembleton 6y agoBill Gates writes about this in one of his books. Not about Minitel, but other technological first movers. His example was how the US first got television but then were stuck with fewer lines per frame than we had in Europe. First mover isn't always an advantageous position to be in.
- rsynnott 6y agoI think the primary problem with NTSC was more colour-related than lines-related, though the argument still basically stands. Interestingly, this one went back and forth, AIUI. The initial British (monochrome) standards, which was very early, was quite flawed; later US standards improved on that, then NTSC improved on those, then PAL and SECAM improved on that (and bounced off each other a bit; the version of PAL that was eventually released used concepts from SECAM). France, being France, did its own thing on the colour transition; SECAM wasn't used anywhere else in Western Europe (SECAM was better than both PAL and NTSC for the end user, but was hard to work with and not commonly used). British and Irish TV channels, incidentally, continued to broadcast the pre-PAL standard on separate frequencies until surprisingly late. I believe the Irish broadcaster only stopped in the _90s_, when their conversion equipment became unreliable.
- fabiensanglard 6y agoWhat a missed opportunity. I remember when we got a free minitel from the post office when I was a kid. It was so expensive to use it that I was barred from even touching it. The only time I used it was many many years later, to check the result of the ceremonious baccalaureat high school exam. It was slow and had ugly graphics compared to the VGA of my 386 but it still felt magical.
- philprx 6y agoWell the popular and expensive services were advertised according to their access code: 3615. But the less known nerd services were found on much less expensive 3614 access code such as RTEL, Privilege, QBBS, ... Even some hackish servers where on the super cheap 3613 or free 3605s.
- 082349872349872 6y agoa Mastodon/3615 Ulla mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVY8MxPhxF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVY8MxPhxF8 I note that the anglophone vorticist magazine Blast[1], No 1 (1914) p.27, blesses france for its mastery of "rose" services. An irony of the Minitel: > "... à l’époque, les femmes à qui je racontais que j’étais donc payé pour faire fantasmer des hommes ... étaient plutôt séduites par ma façon de le faire ... paradoxalement, parler de mon boulot d’animatrice minitel rose était une super technique de drague."[2] [1] https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1143209523824858.pdf https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1143209523824858.pdf [2] http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fowni.fr%2F2012%2F06%2F28%2Fjai-ete-animatrice-de-minitel-rose%2F http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%2...
- anthk 6y agoDid you have free Unix terminals over 3605? I'm curious. Having a remote Unix account for free over minitel would be a godsend.
- philprx 6y agoYes, these were pretty rare and l33t ;-) There were a couple, a university AIX, a CDC NOS/VE with IP connectivity, etc... Basically, free international comms back in the 90s!
- jtokoph 6y agoHere is the Computer Chronicles coverage of minitel: https://youtu.be/DUx7dP2S7h4?t=186 https://youtu.be/DUx7dP2S7h4?t=186
- WhoIsSatoshi 6y agoA briefer look at the service, in english, including current amateur maintained server https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g
- philprx 6y agoThe failure of Minitel lies mainly in the underlying networking model, and resulting capability to become a service provider. Minitel was based on x25. Contrary to IP, x25 was a network where the terminals are dumb and the network needs to be smart. This means that there was an incredibly (for the time) steep learning curve to transition from a Minitel user to a Minitel provider. This meant that the technology could not be easily studied and tested in a garage (even if some like me did), not impossible but tougher than with IP. You know the rest of the story. There are also more minor factors that lead to fall of Minitel but mainly it was IMHO a closed vs. open model root cause. I was heavily into both service and tech of Minitel at that time, AMA.
- JPLeRouzic 6y ago> x25 was a network where the terminals are dumb and the network needs to be smart. At the time that was a common statement, but I fail to see why X25 mandates dumb terminals. However a profound difference was that X25 used streams whereas TCP uses packets. A stream is akin to a TCP socket. It is a fundamental difference that stems from the fact that a X25 data exchange is safe from errors. https://farsite.com/X.25/X.25_info/X.25.htm https://farsite.com/X.25/X.25_info/X.25.htm
- philprx 6y agoIt’s true that most applications were stream oriented, and Minitel was, as the users’ sessions were only bytes (in videotex encoding) rendered by the Minitel as a serial terminal integrating a modem (1200 bauds reception, 75 bauds emission!). There was a smart gateway node that translated complex x25 from the Minitel service providers nodes into simple bidirectional stream of bytes to the Minitels, it was a specialized type of packet asssembler disassembled (PAD) called a PAD Videotex (PAVI). Now x25 did have packets, Minitel terminals did not. So the PAVI and x25 servers were working very differently and with more complexity (hence smart) than Minitel serial terminals (hence dumb). It’s not that x25 mandated dumb terminals.
- non-entity 6y ago
- abhiminator 6y ago[OP here] Amusingly, I learned about Minitel just a few hours ago when I stumbled upon this video from John Stossel's show (obligatory thanks to YouTube algorithm) where he mentions Minitel as an exhibit of government/public sector's failure to innovate and a way for the French government to 'control the growth' of this new technology before private players. Here's the video (with the exact time stamp) where Mr. Stossel talks about Minitel -- https://youtu.be/rOkkqoDJl-s?t=208 https://youtu.be/rOkkqoDJl-s?t=208 I then searched the web (through Google) for information on Minitel and this IEEE article showed up.
- kergonath 6y agoThe Minitel wasn’t the Internet, though, and was in its time quite innovative. There are much better examples of strategic errors from various governments (and private companies as well, but it does not fit the same agenda). [edit] in any case, thanks for the link. That was an interesting read.
- justin66 6y ago> John Stossel's show (obligatory thanks to YouTube algorithm) where he mentions Minitel as an exhibit of government/public sector's failure to innovate and a way for the French government to 'control the growth' of this new technology before private players. I wonder what he thinks ARPANET is an example of. (I don't)
- hylaride 6y agoI don't call myself a libertarian, but I am sympathetic to a lot of their arguments. Stossel comes across as a whiny spoiled brat who can't handle being told 'no' to doing things like lighting up a cigarette in a public school, because it's bad enough that it's a public school but I can't smoke either? The selective arguments he makes can usually be picked apart very easily, too.
- masswerk 6y agoI don't consent with the gist of that show. Rather, I think, the Minitel approach was much like todays app stores: still allowing for private entrepreneurs and innovation, but with a regulating entity, which is also claiming ownership of the transactions, on top of it.
- jcmeyrignac 6y agoI met my first wife thanks to the Minitel. I met my second wife thanks to the Internet.
- WhoIsSatoshi 6y agoBetter graphics?
- agumonkey 6y agomore pop ups
- 082349872349872 6y agoThe dactylo du chat, it's coded in HTML5 in place of Antiope. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24302608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24302608
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rcarmo 6y agoI used one of those. There was a narrow time window prior to the dial-up age when multple telcos considered something similar, but the investment required (especially terminals) was massive. It was a pretty neat universe. I last played with Minitel data when looking at (of all things) _dial-up_ set-top-boxes with a basic browser (it was an Alcatel thing, I think, that talked to a Minitel gateway to render content).
- aarroyoc 6y agoIn Spain we had Ibertex, which is basically the same technology (some minor improvements), but it wasn't as popular as Minitel in France.
- macdice 6y agoI lived in France for a few years around the turn of the millennium and picked up a Minitel 1 cheap at a local flea market. I set it up in the living room as a GUI for a sound system controller connected to a Linux box, playing MP3s. I don't remember the details but there was something odd about the serial port... funky voltage or baud rate or something. It seemed very retro at the time... the design exuded 1970s style in some way (it had some style in common with the Poly-1 computers from my high school in New Zealand, originally released around the same year, 1981). Sadly I left it behind! The keyboard was frankly terrible. Vive l'azerty.
- arthurcolle 6y agoMon gars, t'as vraiment mal ecrit `qwerty` ;)
- kergonath 6y agoSounds very interesting. I would love to read about how you did that.
- macdice 6y agoI don't remember much but I see there are many articles from people who've hooked a Minitel up to a Raspberry Pi or similar in recent times. I think it had a non-standard DIN connector, and you could make up a special cable to get RS232, possibly with a voltage change, not sure about that, and then I think you just had to talk to it very slowly; maybe 1200/75 baud, something like that. There were terminfo definitions for minitel (various models) and I see they are still there in Debian, which means you can write programs using libcurses to do primitive, slow 80s style user interfaces!
- rbanffy 6y ago> using libcurses to do primitive, slow 80s style user interfaces! As for "primitive" it's only on version 13 that Unicode got the 2x3 ITU T.100 mosaics used in Minitel... People are still using Braille to draw graphics that could be neatly done with those terminals.
- cm2187 6y agoAlso in the early days of the internet, most dialup modems sold in France would also allow you to connect to the Minitel (rather than the internet) from your computer.
- philprx 6y agoYes, check if the modem does “V23”, it’s the 1200/75 Minitel modem connection protocol.
- lqet 6y agoTo give some numbers: By 1988 three million terminals were installed, with 100,000 new units installed monthly. The telephone directory received 23 million calls monthly, with 40,000 updates daily. About 6,000 other services were available, with 250 added monthly. France Télécom estimated that almost 9 million terminals—including web-enabled personal computers (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux)—had access to the network at the end of 1999, and that it was used by 25 million people (of a total population of 60 million). Developed by 10,000 companies, in 1996, almost 26,000 different services were available. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel A similar (yet not nearly as successful as Minitel) service existed in Germany (BTX [1]), and I remember my uncle still using it for online banking in 2005 (it was officially shut down in 2001, but online banking continued to work until around 10 years ago). He used a special software for Windows 98 which acted as a kind of BTX browser, so for around 10 years he used BTX and the Internet in parallel, on the same machine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext
- fmajid 6y agoI worked at France Télécom 1994-2000, including bringing up their ISP, Wanadoo. At the time Minitel generated $1B/year in revenue and they had clout in the organization, and risked stifling the Internet (it would have come anyway, but FT would have been left out). I can’t even recount the amount of time I had to spend explaining how web pages could not be priced on a time-spent basis like Minitel.
- ArnoVW 6y agoHey Fazal, LTNC =) Before you arrived in NL I had similar issues with EuroNet management. I remember you telling me about your Java applet to access Minitel from the web. Good times. Hope you are well. My mail is in my profile =)
- ergl 6y agoFYI, your email is not visible. You should put it in the "about" section of your profile.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoInteresting I worked on Prestel (Uk Teletext) billing for a while as well as the Telecom Gold (Dialcom) systems and they had super complex and expensive tariffs which stopped wide uptake. We used to joke that for Prestel you could have a custom tariff for all services almost down to the user level - People whose name is fred and own a goldfish we used to joke. Prestel Billing use to run on a Unisys mainframe and a super niche language called LINC - and was baroque and crufty to an extreme - there was a BBC micro that sat in a corner and Bonged occasional that was part of it (exactly what I never found out)
- hazeii 6y agoHopefully not at Baynard House [0] I was responible for, ah, certain outages at the time. Not in any malicious sense, but because my game (running on a 4Mhz Z80) managed to overload the whole network. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baynard_House,_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baynard_House,_London
- agumonkey 6y agoI had no idea French Telephone network was a shame in the late 70s. At least it wasn't anymore in the 80s (or their marketing dept did magic). Who else reused old minitels as a display here ?
- tmilard 6y agoI was 16 years old. It was 1986 I believe. With my twin brother we discovered the Minitel in our parents's bedroom. We spend all evenings on the minitel after class. Boy it was fun ! We had 'special' codes so we did not pay as much as adults. And we chat with Men (we pretended to a woman). We laught at every kinky sentence they made to us. It was like a writing experience. We chatted with 8 men at th ame time. Hopefully we never told our parents aout what we were doing.. It was my first dating App experience. 10 years before having a Web connexion. Imagine : - All french citizen had a free minitel device (like a mini computer). It was amitious for sure... - Now the only problem with State driven technological projects : Once it was delivered, Th french telecom did not continue to improve the system. Oterwise, France would have been the center of the Web I supose...
- thrwaway69 6y agoWhat do men get out of catfishing other men?
- heavenlyblue 6y agoI am pretty certain it’s especially fun for kids to discover what men are into so that when they finally grow up they could be better in touch with their own needs
- rat9988 6y agoNothing. They are just young people who make fun of others.
- krageon 6y agoI think it's a pretty broad hobby for early teenagers and children. For me personally, I just thought it was funny. It's also interesting, because you find out very fast that there's some guys just a little too into it when you say you're a 13yo girl. That I think informs your behaviour online also. It's a consequence-free way to learn about loads of impulses other people have, without the shadow of adult oversight.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
- tenbino 6y agoI’d like to see a plain text browser with javascript and minitel / teletext style graphics. Maybe it could be good for accessibility .... the concept of making modern websites into plain text just doesn’t work very well (I.e Lynx).
- boudin 6y agoI do think that in term of accessibility and ease of use for some remote services the minitel was quite better than the web is. I worked for a company that ran a service until the very end of the network. This service was used to track mandatory farming informations. Farmers could use the phone, the minitel or the web to do so. There was a whole generation of farmers who used it until the very end and ended up having to use the phone as a replacement. Having to use a computer with the operating system and browser layer made the web version of the service much more complex by nature.
- titilev 6y agoMy father used this kind of service on the minitel (maybe the one your company was running), and indeed it was quite confusing to him to switch to the web version. The later also came with much more information to process.
- anthk 6y agoedbrowse supports JS thru duktape. Enough to sort comments by date on that Spanish Digg/Reddit clone. https://edbrowse.org/ https://edbrowse.org/
- bb101 6y ago"Minitel use peaked in 1993". The closest technology at that time outside France would have been bulletin board services (BBS). Each was run as a separate walled garden but many were linked by Fidonet. So not too dissimilar to Minitel, just more diverse and decentralized.
- philprx 6y agoThere was a similar system for minitel: these were called RTC servers. Nothing to do with WebRTC. It was short for Réseau téléphonique commuté. Basically a simple user would run the equivalent of bbs software on his computer, but with specific tweak that it could talk in videotex encoding. And then of course he would use a modem (even in hackish ways the modem of an existing Minitel) to answer calls on a normal phone line (no x25 here). But these rarely did FIDO.
- mytailorisrich 6y agoThe Minitel could be used as a modem (it had a serial port) I remember it used with Atari ST and Amigas for online chat and file download (1200 bps download, 75 bps upload iirc)
- webreac 6y agoIn 1992, with a minitel 1B (80 columns), I have used the 3621 to connect to a service (129040134) that connected me to a vax station at school. From there I was connected to sun station where I edited my thesis using latex and vi. My teacher never knew I was 700km away from him when he received my daily updates.
- anthk 6y agoHow much did it cost?
- webreac 6y ago.The minitel was free (we had to choose between having a minitel or having a paper annuary). The communication on 3615 was expensive (9.15€ per hour). On 3614 or 3621, it was around 3.05€ per hour (sometimes half).
- anthk 6y agoA bit expensive in 1992. I say this as a Spaniard, OFC the costs of living in France was higher than ours, now are pretty even. EDIT: per hour, about 5C per minute, or 2.5C per minute. It's like a local call, then.
- nabla9 6y agoIn mid-90s Microsoft attempted the same in the US as counterattack against the web but it was already too late. Blackbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)
- anthk 6y agoMSN too.
- raoulvolfoni 6y agoMinitel terminals always were considered to be 'dumb' machines, as mandated by how the service worked. No storage, no graphics capabilities... However, they were running their little 8 bit microcontroler at 14 Mhz, had 32 kB of ROM... (Ok, just 128 bytes of RAM) This guy made it do things it had no business doing: http://hxc2001.free.fr/minitel/ http://hxc2001.free.fr/minitel/ https://youtu.be/a2HD6OzNoEo https://youtu.be/a2HD6OzNoEo
- mhd 6y agoGermany had the same with BTX, was there anything like this at all in the US (for the public, not for army/services/proto-Bloomberg)? Probably not, or else some people would focus more on providing an internet-ready equivalent to this than trying to make "GopherSpace" a thing.
- omerhj 6y agoI believe AT&T was trying to build a "videotex" system based on the NAPLPS protocol which was developed by Telidon in Canada. BYTE Magazine's July 1983 issue was dedicated to videotex: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-07/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-07/mode/2up
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 6y agoThe story seems to echo a bit of why Gopher did not become the WWW (with the added protocol scalability issues that tcp/ip catered for) - basically, Gopher developers set a prohibitive pricing model (I think it was U of Minn)
- frank2 6y agoI recall it was the mere fact that they had a pricing model at all when the competition made it clear that they would not attempt to derive any revenue from anything related to the web (e.g., running a web server, distributing a web client program)
- kuharich 6y agoPast comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405
- tinus_hn 6y agoThe French insisted on doing it all in French while the language of the Internet is English. They isolated themselves and could never have been the center of the web.
- anthk 6y agoBack in the day, not so far from the Minitel days, French was the lingua franca of diplomacy, and spoken all over the world. English was the language of commerce and technology, but French being the language of diplomacy and intercommunication it would be a game changer on teleco. But Minitel was a bit like an enclosed shell, like Gopher. Now Gopher is the opposite, nobody needs a license to host a server.
- pmontra 6y agoThe switch was somewhere in the 70s. For every two English words I hear on TV now there was one in French and one in my language (Italian). Anyway the exposition to foreign languages was much lower because there was no Internet. English got an advantage that French never had in the 20th century. And Hollywood, UK/USA music, etc. All of them larger than their French counterparts.
- anthk 6y agoThat's why I said "pretty close" to Minitel.
- ghaff 6y agoThe use of French in diplomacy was primarily an outgrowth of it having been the court language of continental Europe. You also had dominant languages for other purposes--for certain fields of science, you sort of needed to know German. But as the world increasingly globalized, there were a lot of forces to have a fairly universal language. And between the once huge British Empire and the industrial dominance of the US post-WWII, that language naturally became English.
- 6y ago
- mastazi 6y agoIn Italy we had Videotel which was (IIRC) a localised version of Minitel built for the Italian market. I remember a pub in my neighbourhood had Videotel terminals, I thought it was exciting that you would be able to communicate with someone you didn’t know in a chat room.
- grandinj 6y agoAh, Interesting memories. I worked on Beltel for a while, which was a South African copy of the UK version of this. As in, South Africa got a copy of the code, and developed from there. Ran over ordinary telephone lines using mostly 2400 baud modems to a client which was normally a terminal program running on a PC. The code itself was VAX Pascal running on a set of DEC VAX VMS boxes (5 front-end boxes, and a dual-VAX backend cluster).
- UncleSlacky 6y agoMinitels were freely accessible in post offices, I recall searching for jobs on one in the local PO while on holiday there in the early 90s.
- caymanjim 6y agoBack in the 1980s when I was a l33t hax0r, I used to bounce around the world on X.25 networks, many of which I suspect were operated by Minitel. There was a chat system/early BBS/something called QSD in France, where a lot of hackers would congregate to chat and trade credentials for systems. I can't find much on the net about QSD now, except a few old Phrack articles. Does anyone know what the relationship between Minitel and QSD was?
- thetis 6y agoMinitel is the terminal system, with the CPU, keyboard & screen, but by extension, it includes the protocol to display & download the data. Actually, i was used to connect to "minitel" servers, RTC or BBS-like that were dedicated to the developement of HP48 calculator applications. It was a very rich scene in France, with RTC servers named Pulsar, RTC-one, etc. Basic BBS boards with discussion boards (like HN!) and where you could download HP 48 programs. Some history (in french) about one of these boards http://wiz0u.free.fr/pulsar/historique.php http://wiz0u.free.fr/pulsar/historique.php It was back in 1997 with a pre-internet scene, the first IRL parties, internet friends, etc Basicly it was some smart guy hosting an atari st in the garage, with a dedicated telecom line (so 1 people connected at the same time!).
- doublejay1999 6y agoyou must be as old a me. i was regular on QSD via X25. Great Days. Big big phone bills. QSD was a 3rd party chat service, accessed Via minitel but with a per minute surchage. I met a lot of good friends their, swapped some postcards with some french girls. Great days. I dont know how it came to be accessible via x.25 though.
- icedchai 6y agoA local BBSer introduced me to x.25 hacking probably around 1989 or 90 or so. I remember QSD and another system... Lutzifer, I think?
- caymanjim 6y agoYeah, lutzifer was another X.25 hacker chatroom. I think it was based in Germany. I used to reach it via Telenet [sic]. In retrospect, I think it may have been run by a US government intelligence agency. Someone on there doxxed me despite hopping through a lot of relays that should have been nearly impossible to trace through.
- danw1979 6y agoAnother really good brief history of Minitel from the Creatures Of Thought blog -https://technicshistory.com/2020/05/17/the-era-of-fragmentation-part-3-the-statists/ https://technicshistory.com/2020/05/17/the-era-of-fragmentat...
- seapunk 6y agoBefore knowing the Web, I spent afternoons after the school chatting with strangers on the Minitel, instant messaging was the big thing. Seeing the popularity of the chat feature, a lot of entrepreneurs decided to launch erotic services well-known as "Minitel Rose". People essentially spent their time (and paid a fortune) to flirt with chatbots.
- presspot 6y agoWe also tend to forget about Quantum Link, the precursor to AOL, which was also a very robust system on the Commodore 64 in the mid 80s.
- maire 6y agoI seem to be repeating myself to young whippersnappers, but the web is not the same as the internet. Here is the early history of the internet/arpanet: http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html The internet clearly predated Minitel. The big difference is that it was not initially used for commerce. It was to link the military with universities. I joined Xerox in 1985. Two years earlier the network we were on converted from Arpanet to Internet. There might have been some group somewhere in Xerox that was still on the Arpanet but the military were worried about security so they created the Internet. You can call the exact date of the split between arpanet and internet as being the birth of the internet. Sometime in 1980 I was also involved in hooking up the internet to my college. Urls also predated the web because they were used on the internet. The web made the internet easier to use - that is true. But before then we still had email and discussion boards and distribution groups. It was all text based and somewhat ugly.
- mattl 6y ago> Urls also predated the web because they were used on the internet. Can you give me an example of a pre-web URL?
- not2b 6y agoURLs were invented by Tim Berners-Lee. They do not precede the web. There were separate namespaces before the web; there was Gopher and FTP, and various shorthands to indicate the combination of a site and a path, but no standard, universal resource locator (see what I did there?).
- snom380 6y agoDoes anyone know which of the "classic" minitel terminals had color displays? About the only one I've found is this on: https://sites.google.com/site/collectionminitel/equipements-terminaux/minitel-1-couleur-radiotechnique https://sites.google.com/site/collectionminitel/equipements-...
- gxqoz 6y agoThere's a good early episode of the Reply All podcast on Minitel: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whoda https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whoda One story: They got more business use than you might otherwise expect because they didn't list what services you paid for on the bill. So businessmen were racking up larger charges for sex chatrooms and what have you without having to explain them to their company.
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also for your Minitel needs: 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531 2012 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106
- chaoticmass 6y agoWhen I first learned about the Minitel, most things I found online just said it was done to reduce the cost of printing and shipping phone books. That never sounded right-- very interesting to hear more of the actual story.
- frank2 6y agoThat was the consideration that persuaded the French office in charge of the telephone network to make the initial investment in Minitel.
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