>Somehow ... if I squint a bit.. the minitel model is an appstore. Yes, in the sense that the French phone company handled all billing. So each month's phone b

>Somehow ... if I squint a bit.. the minitel model is an appstore. Yes, in the sense that the French phone company handled all billing. So each month's phone bill showed all Minitel charges. This greatly simplified startups getting started. At the same time, Minitel did not use the CompuServe/AOL model of centralized data hosting; each provider (whether large company or small startup) hosted its own data.[1] This gave startups flexibility by being able to quickly roll out new and updated data and offerings without having to wait for a third party. [1] Part of the rationale for Minitel was for France to avoid dominance by American technology companies like IBM. Unfortunately for such a goal, Minitel providers generally used American technologies like Unix.