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I 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 orga

by fmajid 6y ago

I 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 ago
Hey 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 ago
  FYI, your email is not visible. You should put it in the "about" section of your profile.
C1sc0cat 6y ago
Interesting 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 ago
  Hopefully 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
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    Ah no worked for Telecom gold near London bridge then network house in Aspley spit after workstyle 2000 when they merged telecom gold and prestels developers. Did you know Steve Cornelius? my manger later on - you arnt that Hzaeii from Shades BTW? Recently I worked at the next building over in the same building as the mermaid theatre and used to dink in The cockpit" the "old geezers pub" as a young colleague called it.
    - hazeii 6y ago
      Don't recognise the name,, but then I didn't know any of the Telecom Gold people (I came into it from Micronet). And yes, I am that Hazeii from Shades :)
hazeii 6y ago
Fond memories of lugging a 4.77MHZ Compaq "laptop" [0] to and from Paris to hook a Prestel game up to Minitel via X25. Which fits the mindset as you say, since the game was priced per-unit time and BT were coining it in on the UK side (this wasl still a few years pre-eternal September). [0] Plasma screen, 1 16-bit ISA expansion slot and 1 8-bit, built in PSU.
chaostheory 6y ago
Do you happen to have more info on the people who worked on minitel? Maybe it's because most of the source material is in French, but it would be nice if I could flesh out my page on it. https://theymadethat.com/things/adl/minitel https://theymadethat.com/things/adl/minitel
- fmajid 6y ago
  I only joined FT in 1994 and most of them had moved on. My former boss Jean Lebrun worked on the marquee phone directory application, which was at the time probably the world’s highest transaction-rate database. I believe he was also involved in the abortive effort to sell the tech to Qwest in Denver. Most of the R&D was done by the CCETT lab in Rennes, Brittany. Well into the 90s they were advocating for a graphics-oriented protocol named VEMMI to replace videotex instead of the web. Sort of a cross between X11 and a IBM 3270 terminal conceptually. There were a lot of pitched battles between the Not-invented-here and Web standards camps at FT R&D in those days. As for the roots of the Minitel, they are a bit more prosaic. France believes in industrial policy. When president Giscard made upgrading the phone network a national priority after years of neglect under de Gaulle, the department became the largest government department by budget. When that started to taper off in the late 70s, they needed to find a new outlet for the manufacturing capacity that had hitherto being making Alcatel E10 TDM switches, and the Minitel was that outlet. One of my 6th-grade classmates was actually part of the Vélizy trial project. The paid external provider model was the result of the press worrying FT would compete with them in information services and insisting on an open model. Later Minitels were VT100 compatible, albeit with an atrocious keyboard. I used one as terminal to connect to my university’s Vax running Unix over a 9600 baud serial line from my dorm room. Considering it was free when a real VT100 was more expensive than a PC, that was a substantial cost engineering achievement.
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    Thank you. I was wondering if we could continue the conversation via email? My email should be in my profile. No worries if you don't have time. Mine is limited as well. I just feel that there's a lot history being lost when we don't record any history from engineers who weren't project heads or the original creator. In Minitel's case, it feels worse because it was hard to find information on Bernard Marti, at least in English. I also get this sick feeling knowing that many of the 20th century's engineers have been dying and much of that history is lost forever.

by fmajid 6y ago

ArnoVW 6y ago

Hey 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 ago
FYI, your email is not visible. You should put it in the "about" section of your profile.

C1sc0cat 6y ago

Interesting 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 ago
Hopefully 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
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Ah no worked for Telecom gold near London bridge then network house in Aspley spit after workstyle 2000 when they merged telecom gold and prestels developers. Did you know Steve Cornelius? my manger later on - you arnt that Hzaeii from Shades BTW? Recently I worked at the next building over in the same building as the mermaid theatre and used to dink in The cockpit" the "old geezers pub" as a young colleague called it.
  - hazeii 6y ago
    Don't recognise the name,, but then I didn't know any of the Telecom Gold people (I came into it from Micronet). And yes, I am that Hazeii from Shades :)

hazeii 6y ago

Fond memories of lugging a 4.77MHZ Compaq "laptop" [0] to and from Paris to hook a Prestel game up to Minitel via X25. Which fits the mindset as you say, since the game was priced per-unit time and BT were coining it in on the UK side (this wasl still a few years pre-eternal September). [0] Plasma screen, 1 16-bit ISA expansion slot and 1 8-bit, built in PSU.

chaostheory 6y ago

Do you happen to have more info on the people who worked on minitel? Maybe it's because most of the source material is in French, but it would be nice if I could flesh out my page on it. https://theymadethat.com/things/adl/minitel https://theymadethat.com/things/adl/minitel

fmajid 6y ago
I only joined FT in 1994 and most of them had moved on. My former boss Jean Lebrun worked on the marquee phone directory application, which was at the time probably the world’s highest transaction-rate database. I believe he was also involved in the abortive effort to sell the tech to Qwest in Denver. Most of the R&D was done by the CCETT lab in Rennes, Brittany. Well into the 90s they were advocating for a graphics-oriented protocol named VEMMI to replace videotex instead of the web. Sort of a cross between X11 and a IBM 3270 terminal conceptually. There were a lot of pitched battles between the Not-invented-here and Web standards camps at FT R&D in those days. As for the roots of the Minitel, they are a bit more prosaic. France believes in industrial policy. When president Giscard made upgrading the phone network a national priority after years of neglect under de Gaulle, the department became the largest government department by budget. When that started to taper off in the late 70s, they needed to find a new outlet for the manufacturing capacity that had hitherto being making Alcatel E10 TDM switches, and the Minitel was that outlet. One of my 6th-grade classmates was actually part of the Vélizy trial project. The paid external provider model was the result of the press worrying FT would compete with them in information services and insisting on an open model. Later Minitels were VT100 compatible, albeit with an atrocious keyboard. I used one as terminal to connect to my university’s Vax running Unix over a 9600 baud serial line from my dorm room. Considering it was free when a real VT100 was more expensive than a PC, that was a substantial cost engineering achievement.
- chaostheory 6y ago
  Thank you. I was wondering if we could continue the conversation via email? My email should be in my profile. No worries if you don't have time. Mine is limited as well. I just feel that there's a lot history being lost when we don't record any history from engineers who weren't project heads or the original creator. In Minitel's case, it feels worse because it was hard to find information on Bernard Marti, at least in English. I also get this sick feeling knowing that many of the 20th century's engineers have been dying and much of that history is lost forever.