>As the Minitel experiments progressed in multiple countries, there'd be demand for something like CompuServe for cheap terminals like those. Imagine that, inst

>As the Minitel experiments progressed in multiple countries, there'd be demand for something like CompuServe for cheap terminals like those. Imagine that, instead of Bloomberg/Lexis and other specialized terminals, one could just to all that from a single minitel-like terminal. Or personal computers with Teletext built-in (like the BBC micro, or the Philips PC2000 for instance). That's well and good, but the fact is that Minitel and similar efforts didn't take off anywhere it was tried outside France. Efforts in Belgium, Germany, Ireland, and Nebraska all failed. Why? Because no one, outside the French PTT (i.e., the French government), jumpstarted the network effect by distributing millions of terminals for free. The one exception was Britain, and that was done by mandating that all new TVs supported Prestel. >I think [Microsoft would] try the MSX thing - licensing the same design to every electronics manufacturer eager to enter the home computer market, then milk them while they race to the bottom competing in price. I see what you mean; without DOS, maybe Microsoft would have pushed MSX in the US as well as in Japan. It's not impossible. The PCjr was announced in November 1983 but developers like Sierra On-Line knew about it a year in advance. Perhaps that knowledge caused Microsoft to not push MSX in the US. The counterargument is that Microsoft pushed MSX in Japan because it saw an opportunity in a yet relatively untapped market, with neither home computers nor game consoles having wide penetration yet. This was not true in the US, where Commodore, TI, Apple, Radio Shack, Atari, Coleco, and Mattel were already present. They all entered the market before the PC in August 1981 except Coleco, and I doubt the ColecoVision's introduction was affected in any way by the PC's existence. Everyone expected "the Japanese"—that is, Japanese consumer electronics companies—to enter the US home computer market in the early 1980s, but the Japanese did not because by then the aforementioned US companies were a) already present and b) (with the exception of Apple) incredibly aggressive on price. None of that was contingent on the PC's existence.