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Minitel 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.
by PeterStuer 6y ago
Minitel 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.
- 082349872349872 6y agonot western europe, but SECAM had eastern adoption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455155 (The "Never The Same Colour" retronym also suggests it was colour-related.)
- hyakosm 6y agoSimilarly, the French first program ("première chaine de l'ORTF" before 1975, TF1 after) was transmitted in 625 lines SÉCAM on UHF band and simultaneously on 819 lines black & white on VHF. Old black & white 819 lines was the more highly defined television system before HDTV.
- maaaaattttt 6y agoIt's true. Though it must be noted that infrastructure wise France has caught up pretty nicely [0]. I think in terms of the country adopting the web for it's everyday life, like administrative procedures, it's still far behind other countries. It would be nice if there were some quantitative values out there to be able to compare objectively. [0] https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
- m_t 6y agoI feel infrastructure in France, at least for the consumer, is pretty good. I had proper 100Mbits/s fiber in Paris 10 years ago and I still can't get that in my part of London.
- Uberphallus 6y agoFiber in France is very patchy, I had fiber in my previous tiny apartment in a building that was almost falling down, moved to new construction building aaaaand... back to ADSL, 10mbit, less on rainy days.